Guangxiang Zhao
Publications
Thinking with Reasoning Skills: Fewer Tokens, More Accuracy
Reasoning LLMs often spend substantial tokens on long intermediate reasoning traces (e.g., chain-of-thought) when solving new problems. We propose to summarize and store reusable reasoning skills distilled from extensive deliberation and trial-and-error exploration, and to retrieve these skills at inference time to guide future reasoning. Unlike the prevailing \emph{reasoning from scratch} paradigm, our approach first recalls relevant skills for each query, helping the model avoid redundant detours and focus on effective solution paths. We evaluate our method on coding and mathematical reasoning tasks, and find that it significantly reduces reasoning tokens while improving overall performance. The resulting lower per-request cost indicates strong practical and economic potential for real-world deployment.
Beyond Parameter Arithmetic: Sparse Complementary Fusion for Distribution-Aware Model Merging
Model merging has emerged as a promising paradigm for composing the capabilities of large language models by directly operating in weight space, enabling the integration of specialized models without costly retraining. However, existing merging methods largely rely on parameter-space heuristics, which often introduce severe interference, leading to degraded generalization and unstable generation behaviors such as repetition and incoherent outputs. In this work, we propose Sparse Complementary Fusion with reverse KL (SCF-RKL), a novel model merging framework that explicitly controls functional interference through sparse, distribution-aware updates. Instead of assuming linear additivity in parameter space, SCF-RKL measures the functional divergence between models using reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence and selectively incorporates complementary parameters. This mode-seeking, sparsity-inducing design effectively preserves stable representations while integrating new capabilities. We evaluate SCF-RKL across a wide range of model scales and architectures, covering both reasoning-focused and instruction-tuned models. Extensive experiments on 24 benchmarks spanning advanced reasoning, general reasoning and knowledge, instruction following, and safety demonstrate, vision classification that SCF-RKL consistently outperforms existing model merging methods while maintaining strong generalization and generation stability.