CoT transformers simulate any Word RAM algorithm with poly-logarithmic overhead in three architectures, improving on quadratic TM overhead.
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OpenAI o1 System Card
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abstract
The o1 model series is trained with large-scale reinforcement learning to reason using chain of thought. These advanced reasoning capabilities provide new avenues for improving the safety and robustness of our models. In particular, our models can reason about our safety policies in context when responding to potentially unsafe prompts, through deliberative alignment. This leads to state-of-the-art performance on certain benchmarks for risks such as generating illicit advice, choosing stereotyped responses, and succumbing to known jailbreaks. Training models to incorporate a chain of thought before answering has the potential to unlock substantial benefits, while also increasing potential risks that stem from heightened intelligence. Our results underscore the need for building robust alignment methods, extensively stress-testing their efficacy, and maintaining meticulous risk management protocols. This report outlines the safety work carried out for the OpenAI o1 and OpenAI o1-mini models, including safety evaluations, external red teaming, and Preparedness Framework evaluations.
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- abstract The o1 model series is trained with large-scale reinforcement learning to reason using chain of thought. These advanced reasoning capabilities provide new avenues for improving the safety and robustness of our models. In particular, our models can reason about our safety policies in context when responding to potentially unsafe prompts, through deliberative alignment. This leads to state-of-the-art performance on certain benchmarks for risks such as generating illicit advice, choosing stereotyped responses, and succumbing to known jailbreaks. Training models to incorporate a chain of thought b
co-cited works
representative citing papers
MedPRMBench is the first fine-grained benchmark for process reward models in medical reasoning, featuring 6500 questions, 13000 chains, 113910 step labels, and a baseline that improves downstream QA accuracy by 3.2-6.7 points.
The SDE benchmark shows LLMs lag on scientific discovery tasks relative to general science tests, with diminishing scaling returns and shared weaknesses across models.
CritPt benchmark shows state-of-the-art LLMs reach only 5.7% average accuracy on full-scale unpublished physics research tasks, rising to about 10% with coding tools.
Flow-GRPO is the first online RL method for flow matching models, raising GenEval accuracy from 63% to 95% and text-rendering accuracy from 59% to 92% with little reward hacking.
Physics-IQ benchmark reveals that generative video models exhibit limited physical understanding unrelated to their visual quality.
Active lifting of data distributions via latent-sequence sampling and max-rate uncertainty reduction formally derives slow-thinking LLMs and places them on representation and sampler hierarchies that can be climbed.
Variable-length autoregressive latent sequences, trained as variational inference with a PPO-style objective, give robot policies adaptive test-time compute and yield a reusable action tokenizer.
When reflections localize early errors, in-context search solves exp-small pass-rate problems with poly sequential attempts; otherwise it offers no asymptotic gain over parallel sampling, and the update is learnable and RLVR-optimal.
Purified OPSD subtracts a reference-only teacher's signal from standard OPSD supervision and applies PMI to create a cleaner distillation target, yielding gains on long-CoT models while preserving epistemic behavior.
Maven is an RL method using answer-conditioned evidence-state values to assign rewards to add, link, and drop actions on evidence memory, outperforming outcome-only baselines on LongBench v2, LongReason, and RULER.
DiscoLoop adds a decoded token-embedding channel to looped transformers, fixing a representation mismatch that limited implicit multi-hop reasoning and improving OOD generalization.
Introduces NCP-ExploreToM framework to evaluate LLMs on inducing belief states via planning and action, with GPT-5 succeeding on ~80% of tasks and outperforming humans.
Proposes Monotonic Inference Policy Improvement (MIPI) objective and MIPU two-step update framework to address objective misalignment between training and inference policies in LLM reinforcement learning.
TempAct introduces a planner-executor RL framework with hierarchical group exploration and rewards to improve temporal consistency in autoregressive video diffusion models.
Reflect-R1 introduces the first evidence-driven self-correction framework for long video understanding using a three-stage pipeline, stage-decoupled RL via SD-GRPO, and a 120K dataset to achieve SOTA on VideoMME and LongVideoBench.
Cliff tokens are single tokens triggering LLM math reasoning failures, identified via adaptive z-test threshold on token potential; a taxonomy and Cliff-DPO optimization yield up to +6.6 accuracy gains.
A continuous latent bridge between frozen slow and fast VLMs improves Atari game performance when slow reasoning outperforms fast reaction, matching or exceeding a text-based bridge.
SGPO extracts strategies from strong-model responses, builds autonomous and guided trajectories, and applies token-level forward-KL distillation with adaptive weighting to outperform SFT and RL baselines by 2.2 points on math benchmarks.
Empirical evaluation on LiveCodeBench shows certainty-based RLIF yields early gains followed by output shortening and reasoning collapse, providing no advantage for RLVR initialization on code tasks.
ICT framework applies JS divergence to token logits to select critical tokens for selective RLVR updates, claiming 4.58% average pass@4 gains on Qwen2.5 models across seven reasoning benchmarks.
d-OPSD reframes on-policy self-distillation for dLLMs via suffix conditioning from self-generated answers and step-level supervision, outperforming RLVR and SFT on reasoning benchmarks with ~10% of the optimization steps.
PRISM is a contrastive, policy-aware training framework for process reward models that reduces false positives by 22% on PRMBench and boosts downstream accuracy up to 33% in Best-of-N selection by learning reliable relative comparisons instead of pointwise labels.
CRANE uses dual-library retrieval plus two-phase training (SFT then GRPO with cognitive routing reward) to reach 96.9% grounded success on conflict edits in reasoning MLLMs.
citing papers explorer
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Efficiently Representing Algorithms With Chain-of-Thought Transformers
CoT transformers simulate any Word RAM algorithm with poly-logarithmic overhead in three architectures, improving on quadratic TM overhead.
-
MedPRMBench: A Fine-grained Benchmark for Process Reward Models in Medical Reasoning
MedPRMBench is the first fine-grained benchmark for process reward models in medical reasoning, featuring 6500 questions, 13000 chains, 113910 step labels, and a baseline that improves downstream QA accuracy by 3.2-6.7 points.
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Evaluating Large Language Models in Scientific Discovery
The SDE benchmark shows LLMs lag on scientific discovery tasks relative to general science tests, with diminishing scaling returns and shared weaknesses across models.
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Probing the Critical Point (CritPt) of AI Reasoning: a Frontier Physics Research Benchmark
CritPt benchmark shows state-of-the-art LLMs reach only 5.7% average accuracy on full-scale unpublished physics research tasks, rising to about 10% with coding tools.
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Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RL
Flow-GRPO is the first online RL method for flow matching models, raising GenEval accuracy from 63% to 95% and text-rendering accuracy from 59% to 92% with little reward hacking.
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Do generative video models understand physical principles?
Physics-IQ benchmark reveals that generative video models exhibit limited physical understanding unrelated to their visual quality.
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A First-Principles Theory of Slow Thinking and Active Perception
Active lifting of data distributions via latent-sequence sampling and max-rate uncertainty reduction formally derives slow-thinking LLMs and places them on representation and sampler hierarchies that can be climbed.
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Latent Memory Palace: Reasoning for Control as Autoregressive Variational Inference
Variable-length autoregressive latent sequences, trained as variational inference with a PPO-style objective, give robot policies adaptive test-time compute and yield a reusable action tokenizer.
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When Does In-Context Search Help? A Sampling-Complexity Theory of Reflection-Driven Reasoning
When reflections localize early errors, in-context search solves exp-small pass-rate problems with poly sequential attempts; otherwise it offers no asymptotic gain over parallel sampling, and the update is learnable and RLVR-optimal.
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Purified OPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation Without Losing How to Think
Purified OPSD subtracts a reference-only teacher's signal from standard OPSD supervision and applies PMI to create a cleaner distillation target, yielding gains on long-CoT models while preserving epistemic behavior.
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Evidence-State Rewards for Long-Context Reasoning
Maven is an RL method using answer-conditioned evidence-state values to assign rewards to add, link, and drop actions on evidence memory, outperforming outcome-only baselines on LongBench v2, LongReason, and RULER.
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DiscoLoop: Looping Discrete Embeddings and Continuous Hidden States for Multi-hop Reasoning
DiscoLoop adds a decoded token-embedding channel to looped transformers, fixing a representation mismatch that limited implicit multi-hop reasoning and improving OOD generalization.
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Theory of Mind and Persuasion Beyond Conversation: Assessing the Capacity of LLMs to Induce Belief States via Planning and Action
Introduces NCP-ExploreToM framework to evaluate LLMs on inducing belief states via planning and action, with GPT-5 succeeding on ~80% of tasks and outperforming humans.
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The Mirage of Optimizing Training Policies: Monotonic Inference Policies as the Real Objective for LLM Reinforcement Learning
Proposes Monotonic Inference Policy Improvement (MIPI) objective and MIPU two-step update framework to address objective misalignment between training and inference policies in LLM reinforcement learning.
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TempAct: Advancing Temporal Plausibility in Autoregressive Video Generation via Planner-Executor RL
TempAct introduces a planner-executor RL framework with hierarchical group exploration and rewards to improve temporal consistency in autoregressive video diffusion models.
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Reflect-R1: Evidence-Driven Reflection for Self-Correction in Long Video Understanding
Reflect-R1 introduces the first evidence-driven self-correction framework for long video understanding using a three-stage pipeline, stage-decoupled RL via SD-GRPO, and a 120K dataset to achieve SOTA on VideoMME and LongVideoBench.
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Cliff Tokens: Identifying Single-Token Failure Triggers in LLM Mathematical Reasoning
Cliff tokens are single tokens triggering LLM math reasoning failures, identified via adaptive z-test threshold on token potential; a taxonomy and Cliff-DPO optimization yield up to +6.6 accuracy gains.
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The Latent Bridge: A Continuous Slow-Fast Channel for Real-Time Game Agents
A continuous latent bridge between frozen slow and fast VLMs improves Atari game performance when slow reasoning outperforms fast reaction, matching or exceeding a text-based bridge.
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Beyond Trajectory Imitation: Strategy-Guided Policy Optimization for LLM Reasoning
SGPO extracts strategies from strong-model responses, builds autonomous and guided trajectories, and applies token-level forward-KL distillation with adaptive weighting to outperform SFT and RL baselines by 2.2 points on math benchmarks.
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When Do Intrinsic Rewards Work for Code Reasoning? A Comprehensive Study
Empirical evaluation on LiveCodeBench shows certainty-based RLIF yields early gains followed by output shortening and reasoning collapse, providing no advantage for RLVR initialization on code tasks.
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Beyond Entropy: Learning from Token-Level Distributional Deviations for LLM Reasoning
ICT framework applies JS divergence to token logits to select critical tokens for selective RLVR updates, claiming 4.58% average pass@4 gains on Qwen2.5 models across seven reasoning benchmarks.
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Learning from the Self-future: On-policy Self-distillation for dLLMs
d-OPSD reframes on-policy self-distillation for dLLMs via suffix conditioning from self-generated answers and step-level supervision, outperforming RLVR and SFT on reasoning benchmarks with ~10% of the optimization steps.
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The Hidden Bias of Process Reward Models:PRISM for Rewarding the Right Reasoning
PRISM is a contrastive, policy-aware training framework for process reward models that reduces false positives by 22% on PRMBench and boosts downstream accuracy up to 33% in Best-of-N selection by learning reliable relative comparisons instead of pointwise labels.
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CRANE: Knowledge Editing for Reasoning MLLMs
CRANE uses dual-library retrieval plus two-phase training (SFT then GRPO with cognitive routing reward) to reach 96.9% grounded success on conflict edits in reasoning MLLMs.
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On the Geometry of On-Policy Distillation
OPD updates occupy a relaxed off-principal regime and rapidly lock into a low-dimensional subspace that is functionally sufficient for its performance, distinct from SFT and RLVR trajectories.
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Reinforcement Learning Elicits Contextual Learning of Unseen Language Translation
RL with chrF reward trains LLMs to better utilize in-context linguistic knowledge for zero-shot translation of unseen languages, outperforming ICL and SFT.
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OrderGrad: Optimizing Beyond the Mean with Order-Statistic Policy Gradient Estimation
OrderGrad supplies unbiased likelihood-ratio and reparameterization gradient estimators for finite-sample L-statistics by applying a rank-based reward transformation usable in standard policy-gradient updates.
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Reinforcement Learning from Rich Feedback with Distributional DAgger
DistIL applies distributional DAgger with forward cross-entropy to achieve monotonic policy improvement and better Pass@N from rich feedback in RL for reasoning tasks.
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Rotate2Think: Geometric Priming via Orthogonal Rotation to Improve Language Model Reasoning
Rotate2Think estimates an orthogonal rotation from input to thinking embeddings via Procrustes analysis on a few examples and injects the resulting vector to prime reasoning traces, raising accuracy in 30 of 32 model-benchmark settings.
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Exploiting Verification-Generation Gap: Test-Time Reinforcement Learning with Confidence-Conditioned Verification
TTRL-CoCoV is a confidence-conditioned test-time RL framework that selectively applies verification to address pseudo-label errors and diversity collapse, yielding +9.8% Pass@1 and +18.7% Pass@16 gains over prior TTRL on reasoning benchmarks.
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Faster Synchronous On-Policy RL via Straggler-Aware Group Sizing
SAGC dynamically adjusts group sizes in synchronous GRPO and DAPO via online constrained optimization to cut stragglers, improve wall-clock speed, and maintain or improve rewards and downstream reasoning performance.
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CultureForest: Understanding and Evaluating Cultural Norm Grounded Reasoning in LLMs
CultureForest benchmark shows top LLMs degrade sharply on open-ended cultural reasoning tasks, exhibit regional disparities, and are limited more by effective use of knowledge than by lack of knowledge itself.
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LinTree: Improving LLM Reasoning with Explicitly Structured Search Histories
Adding explicit parent pointers to represent search tree structure in LLM reasoning traces (LinTree) improves task performance and search efficiency on Blocks World, grid Navigation, and Sokoban relative to implicit traces and LLM-heuristic search.
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Every Act Has Its Price: Compressed Moral Composition in Frontier LLMs
Moral Trolley Arena shows frontier LLMs produce composite moral preferences that are compressed rather than additive functions of calibrated component act strengths across Moral Foundations Theory.
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Explicit Critic Guidance for Aligning Diffusion Models
Introduces a state-aligned latent actor-critic framework that lets diffusion models act as their own timestep-conditioned value functions for trajectory-level RL post-training and inference steering.
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Diversity Over Frequency: Rethinking Tool Use in Visual Chain-of-Thought Agents
Visual CoT agents exhibit tool-use collapse where tool usage declines but task accuracy rises, and adding entropy regularization for rollout diversity produces the strongest performance.
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Selective Latent Thinking: Adaptive Compression of LLM Reasoning Chains
SLT selectively compresses reasoning spans via anticipation and gating, trained in three stages including RL, yielding 22.7% higher accuracy than uniform latent baselines at similar compression and 58.4% shorter chains with 2.8% accuracy drop vs explicit CoT on math benchmarks.
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CurveRL: Principled Distribution-Aware Context Reweighting for LLM Reasoning
CurveRL derives a quantile-coordinate reweighting rule from a utility functional on pass rates and shows it outperforms GRPO on reasoning benchmarks.
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CopT: Contrastive On-Policy Thinking with Continuous Spaces for General and Agentic Reasoning
CopT reverses CoT by eliciting a draft answer first then using continuous-embedding contrastive verification and on-policy thinking to reflect and correct, yielding up to 23% higher accuracy and 57% fewer tokens without training.
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PSD: Pushing the Pareto Frontier of Diffusion LLMs via Parallel Speculative Decoding
PSD is a training-free framework that jointly optimizes spatial unmasking and temporal speculative decoding in diffusion LLMs to reach up to 5.5x tokens per forward pass while preserving accuracy comparable to greedy decoding.
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CAPS: Cascaded Adaptive Pairwise Selection for Efficient Parallel Reasoning
CAPS is a four-stage inference-only cascade that adapts how much of each solution the verifier sees and how comparisons are distributed, halving per-candidate verifier tokens while outperforming uniform pairwise verification on most benchmarks.
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Hierarchical Attacks for Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Reasoning
HAM³ achieves up to 78.3% attack success rate on the GQA benchmark by hierarchically attacking perception, communication, and reasoning layers in multi-modal multi-agent systems.
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Lying Is Just a Phase: The Hidden Alignment Transition in Language Model Scaling
Language models show a scale-dependent switch from anticorrelated to correlated reasoning-truthfulness coupling at a family-specific critical parameter count, with architecture and data choices shifting the transition point.
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Formalize, Don't Optimize: The Heuristic Trap in LLM-Generated Combinatorial Solvers
LLM-generated combinatorial solvers achieve highest correctness when the model formalizes problems for verified backends rather than attempting to optimize search, which often causes regressions.
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Deep Reasoning in General Purpose Agents via Structured Meta-Cognition
DOLORES, an agent using a formal language for meta-reasoning to construct adaptive scaffolds on the fly, outperforms prior scaffolding methods by 24.8% on average across four hard benchmarks and multiple model sizes.
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DeepRefine: Agent-Compiled Knowledge Refinement via Reinforcement Learning
DeepRefine refines agent-compiled knowledge bases via multi-turn abductive diagnosis and RL training with a GBD reward, yielding consistent downstream task gains.
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Relative Score Policy Optimization for Diffusion Language Models
RSPO interprets reward advantages as targets for relative log-ratios in dLLMs, calibrating noisy estimates to stabilize RLVR training and achieve strong gains on planning tasks with competitive math reasoning performance.
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V-ABS: Action-Observer Driven Beam Search for Dynamic Visual Reasoning
V-ABS is an action-observer beam search method with entropy-based adaptive weighting and an 80k-sample SFT dataset that delivers 19.7% average gains on visual reasoning tasks for MLLMs.
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LEAD: Length-Efficient Adaptive and Dynamic Reasoning for Large Language Models
LEAD uses online adaptive mechanisms including Potential-Scaled Instability and symmetric efficiency rewards based on correct rollouts to achieve higher accuracy-efficiency scores with substantially shorter reasoning outputs than base models on math benchmarks.
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Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Visual Continual Learning with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
RaPO reduces catastrophic forgetting in visual continual learning by shaping rewards around policy drift and stabilizing advantages with cross-task exponential moving averages during reinforcement fine-tuning of multimodal models.