Paper · arXiv 2504.07086
A Sober Look at Progress in Language Model Reasoning: Pitfalls and Paths to Reproducibility
Andreas Hochlehnert, Hardik Bhatnagar, Vishaal Udandarao, Samuel Albanie, Ameya Prabhu, Matthias Bethge
A standardized evaluation framework reveals that reinforcement learning offers limited improvements over supervised fine-tuning in mathematical reasoning benchmarks, highlighting issues with transparency and variability in current methodologies.
Abstract
Reasoning has emerged as the next major frontier for language models (LMs), with rapid advances from both academic and industrial labs. However, this progress often outpaces methodological rigor, with many evaluations relying on benchmarking practices that lack transparency, robustness, or statistical grounding. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study and find that current mathematical reasoning benchmarks are highly sensitive to subtle implementation choices - including decoding parameters, random seeds, prompt formatting, and even hardware and software-framework configurations. Performance gains reported in recent studies frequently hinge on unclear comparisons or unreported sources of variance. To address these issues, we propose a standardized evaluation framework with clearly defined best practices and reporting standards. Using this framework, we reassess recent methods and find that reinforcement learning (RL) approaches yield only modest improvements - far below prior claims - and are prone to overfitting, especially on small-scale benchmarks like AIME24. In contrast, supervised finetuning (SFT) methods show consistently stronger generalization. To foster reproducibility, we release all code, prompts, and model outputs, for reasoning benchmarks, establishing more rigorous foundations for future work.