Kathleen A. Yearick

2 papers indexed

arxivcs.LGcs.AIcs.CLstat.ML2026-06-30

GRPO, Dr. GRPO, and DAPO Are Three Operations on One Number: The Group-Standard-Deviation Identity

Three of the most popular methods for training language models to reason look like three different tricks. They are not. All three adjust a single number: standard deviation, reflecting how much a prompt's sampled answers disagree. When such a model is trained, it answers each pr…

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arxivcs.LGcs.AIcs.CLstat.ML2026-06-27

When More Sampling Hurts: The Modal Ceiling and Correlation Ceiling of Test-Time Scaling

Yong Yi Bay, Kathleen A. Yearick

People overthink; language models over-sample, and the extra effort can talk both into a worse answer. Reasoning systems answer a hard question by sampling it many times (test-time scaling), and the more they draw, the more often a correct answer turns up somewhere, so coverage,…

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