C. N Li

h-index1
2papers
2citations

2 Papers

9.6CLOct 23, 2025Code
Teaching Language Models to Reason with Tools

Chengpeng Li, Zhengyang Tang, Ziniu Li et al.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) like OpenAI-o1 have shown impressive capabilities in natural language reasoning. However, these models frequently demonstrate inefficiencies or inaccuracies when tackling complex mathematical operations. While integrating computational tools such as Code Interpreters (CIs) offers a promising solution, it introduces a critical challenge: a conflict between the model's internal, probabilistic reasoning and the external, deterministic knowledge provided by the CI, which often leads models to unproductive deliberation. To overcome this, we introduce CoRT (Code-Optimized Reasoning Training), a post-training framework designed to teach LRMs to effectively utilize CIs. We propose \emph{Hint-Engineering}, a new data synthesis strategy that strategically injects diverse hints at optimal points within reasoning paths. This approach generates high-quality, code-integrated reasoning data specifically tailored to optimize LRM-CI interaction. Using this method, we have synthesized 30 high-quality samples to post-train models ranging from 1.5B to 32B parameters through supervised fine-tuning. CoRT further refines the multi-round interleaving of external CI usage and internal thinking by employing rejection sampling and reinforcement learning. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate CoRT's effectiveness, yielding absolute improvements of 4\% and 8\% on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, respectively, across five challenging mathematical reasoning datasets. Moreover, CoRT significantly enhances efficiency, reducing token usage by approximately 30\% for the 32B model and 50\% for the 1.5B model compared to pure natural language reasoning baselines. The models and code are available at: https://github.com/ChengpengLi1003/CoRT.

0.6CLFeb 1
Chronos: Learning Temporal Dynamics of Reasoning Chains for Test-Time Scaling

Kai Zhang, Jiayi Liao, Chengpeng Li et al.

Test-Time Scaling (TTS) has emerged as an effective paradigm for improving the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods -- most notably majority voting and heuristic token-level scoring -- treat reasoning traces or tokens equally, thereby being susceptible to substantial variations in trajectory quality and localized logical failures. In this work, we introduce \textbf{Chronos}, a lightweight and plug-and-play chronological reasoning scorer that models each trajectory as a time series. Specifically, Chronos learns to capture trajectory features of token probabilities, assigns quality scores accordingly, and employs a weighted voting mechanism. Extensive evaluations on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks demonstrate that Chronos consistently delivers substantial gains across a variety of models, with negligible computational overhead. Notably, Chronos@128 achieves relative improvements of 34.21\% over Pass@1 and 22.70\% over Maj@128 on HMMT25 using Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507, highlighting its effectiveness.