A major drawback of reasoning models is their excessive token usage, inflating computational cost, resource demand, and latency. We show this verbosity stems not from deeper reasoning but from reinforcement learning loss minimization when models produce incorrect answers. With unsolvable problems dominating training, this effect compounds into a systematic tendency toward longer outputs. Through theoretical analysis of PPO and GRPO, we prove that incorrect answers inherently drive policies toward verbosity \textit{even when} $\gamma=1$, reframing response lengthening as an optimization artifact. We further uncover a consistent correlation between conciseness and correctness across reasoning and non-reasoning models. Building on these insights, we propose a two-phase RL procedure where a brief secondary stage, trained on a small set of solvable problems, significantly reduces response length while preserving or improving accuracy. Finally, we show that while GRPO shares properties with PPO, it exhibits collapse modes, limiting its reliability for concise reasoning. Our claims are supported by extensive experiments.

We introduce OpenDebateEvidence, a comprehensive dataset for argument mining and summarization sourced from the American Competitive Debate community. This dataset includes over 3.5 million documents with rich metadata, making it one of the most extensive collections of debate evidence. OpenDebateEvidence captures the complexity of arguments in high school and college debates, providing valuable resources for training and evaluation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of fine-tuning state-of-the-art large language models for argumentative abstractive summarization across various methods, models, and datasets. By providing this comprehensive resource, we aim to advance computational argumentation and support practical applications for debaters, educators, and researchers. OpenDebateEvidence is publicly available to support further research and innovation in computational argumentation. Access it here: this https URL

Deep neural networks tend to exhibit a bias toward low-rank solutions during training, implicitly learning low-dimensional feature representations. This paper investigates how deep multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) encode these feature manifolds and connects this behavior to the Information Bottleneck (IB) theory. We introduce the concept of local rank as a measure of feature manifold dimensionality and demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, that this rank decreases during the final phase of training. We argue that networks that reduce the rank of their learned representations also compress mutual information between inputs and intermediate layers. This work bridges the gap between feature manifold rank and information compression, offering new insights into the interplay between information bottlenecks and representation learning.

Human communication is a multifaceted and multimodal skill. Communication requires an understanding of both the surface-level textual content and the connotative intent of a piece of communication. In humans, learning to go beyond the surface level starts by learning communicative intent in speech. Once humans acquire these skills in spoken communication, they transfer those skills to written communication. In this paper, we assess the ability of speech+text models and text models trained with special emphasis on human-to-human conversations to make this multimodal transfer of skill. We specifically test these models on their ability to detect covert deceptive communication. We find that with no special prompting speech+text LLMs have an advantage over unimodal LLMs in performing this task. Likewise, we find that human-to-human conversation-trained LLMs are also advantaged in this skill.

In deep learning, processing multidimensional inputs (e.g., images, medical scans, and time series) is an important task that often requires flattening the inputs. We introduce $\mathit{NdLinear}$, a drop-in replacement for linear layers that operates directly on tensors, requiring no flattening. By applying transformations separately along each dimension, NdLinear preserves native data structure while achieving dramatic parameter reductions, often by orders of magnitude, with minimal memory overhead. We prove NdLinear maintains expressivity through structured Tucker decomposition while preserving VC-dimension scaling. Extensive experiments demonstrate NdLinear's capacity to achieve significant parameter reductions with substantial wall-clock efficiency gains and minimal memory overhead. For instance, our $\mathit{NdLinear-LoRA}$ matches or exceeds standard LoRA on language reasoning tasks using up to $9\times$ fewer parameters. Experiments across CNNs, RNNs, Transformers, and MLPs on vision, language, time-series, and tabular tasks consistently demonstrate NdLinear's efficiency gains. While excelling at axis-separable tasks, NdLinear has limitations with entangled spatial interactions. By processing data in its original N-dimensional form, NdLinear provides a theoretically grounded, practical component for building more efficient neural architectures.