{"paper":{"title":"Can an Easy-to-Hard Curriculum Make Reasoning Emerge in Small Language Models? Evidence from a Four-Stage Curriculum on GPT-2","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Xiang Fu","submitted_at":"2025-05-16T19:08:31Z","abstract_excerpt":"We demonstrate that a developmentally ordered curriculum markedly improves reasoning transparency and sample-efficiency in small language models (SLMs). Concretely, we train Cognivolve, a 124 M-parameter GPT-2 model, on a four-stage syllabus that ascends from lexical matching to multi-step symbolic inference and then evaluate it without any task-specific fine-tuning. Cognivolve reaches target accuracy in half the optimization steps of a single-phase baseline, activates an order-of-magnitude more gradient-salient reasoning heads, and shifts those heads toward deeper layers, yielding higher-entr"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2505.11643","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2505.11643/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}