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Learning to Reason in 13 Parameters (arxiv.org)
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In plain words: A new trick lets a big language model learn math reasoning by adjusting just 13 numbers, shrinking the usual add-on update to a single direction. It reached 91% on grade-school word problems; only reinforcement learning worked, while standard fine-tuning needed far bigger changes.

Abstract

Recent research has shown that language models can learn to \textit{reason}, often via reinforcement learning. Some work even trains low-rank parameterizations for reasoning, but conventional LoRA cannot scale below the model dimension. We question whether even rank=1 LoRA is necessary for learning to reason and propose TinyLoRA, a method for scaling low-rank adapters to sizes as small as one parameter. Within our new parameterization, we are able to train the 8B parameter size of Qwen2.5 to 91\% accuracy on GSM8K with only 13 trained parameters in bf16 (26 total bytes). We find this trend holds in general: we are able to recover 90\% of performance improvements while training $1000x$ fewer parameters across a suite of more difficult learning-to-reason benchmarks such as AIME, AMC, and MATH500. Notably, we are only able to achieve such strong performance with RL: models trained using SFT require $100-1000x$ larger updates to reach the same performance.

John X. Morris, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Mark Ibrahim, Saeed Mahloujifar
arXiv:2602.04118 · cs.LG · submitted Feb 4, 2026
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Also discussed: Mar 2026 (234 points, 45 comments) · Feb 2026 (3 points, 0 comments)