collaborators

6 papers

cs.LG2026

Training Reasoning Models on Saturated Problems via Failure-Prefix Conditioning

Minwu Kim, Safal Shrestha, Anubhav Shrestha +1

As Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) substantially improves the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), a new bottleneck emerges: more training pro…

cs.LG2026

On the Limits of Layer Pruning for Generative Reasoning in Large Language Models

Safal Shrestha, Anubhav Shrestha, Aadim Nepal +2

Recent work has shown that layer pruning can effectively compress large language models (LLMs) while retaining strong performance on classification benchmarks, often with little or…

cs.AI2026

Warm Up Before You Train: Unlocking General Reasoning in Resource-Constrained Settings

Safal Shrestha, Minwu Kim, Aadim Nepal +2

Designing effective reasoning-capable LLMs typically requires training using Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) or distillation with carefully curated Long Chain…

cs.LG2025

Layer Importance for Mathematical Reasoning is Forged in Pre-Training and Invariant after Post-Training

Aadim Nepal, Safal Shrestha, Anubhav Shrestha +4

Large language models improve at math after instruction tuning, reinforcement learning, or knowledge distillation. We ask whether these gains come from major changes in the transfo…

cs.AI2025

Reinforcement Learning vs. Distillation: Understanding Accuracy and Capability in LLM Reasoning

Minwu Kim, Anubhav Shrestha, Safal Shrestha +2

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) enhances overall accuracy (pass@1) but often fails to improve capability (pass@k) of LLMs in re…

cs.LG2025

Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models: Assessing Logical and Arithmetic Errors across Wide Numerical Ranges

Safal Shrestha, Minwu Kim, Keith Ross

Mathematical reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) is often evaluated using benchmarks with limited numerical ranges, failing to reflect real-world problem-solving across diver…