arxivcs.LGcs.AIcs.CL2026-07-17
Understanding Reasoning from Pretraining to Post-Training
Jingyan Shen, Ang Li, Salman Rahman, Yifan Sun, Micah Goldblum, Matus Telgarsky, et al.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to improving large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks, yet RL post-training is largely studied in isolation from the pretraining that precedes it. As a result, two basic questions remain open: (1) how do pretraining ch…