Satori: Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Action-Thought Enhances LLM
  Reasoning via Autoregressive Search
Authors: name: Maohao Shen; name: Guangtao Zeng; name: Zhenting Qi; name: Zhang-Wei Hong; name: Zhenfang Chen; name: Wei Lu; name: Gregory Wornell; name: Subhro Das; name: David Cox; name: Chuang Gan
Published: 2025-02-04 17:26:58

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning
capabilities across diverse domains. Recent studies have shown that increasing
test-time computation enhances LLMs' reasoning capabilities. This typically
involves extensive sampling at inference time guided by an external LLM
verifier, resulting in a two-player system. Despite external guidance, the
effectiveness of this system demonstrates the potential of a single LLM to
tackle complex tasks. Thus, we pose a new research problem: Can we internalize
the searching capabilities to fundamentally enhance the reasoning abilities of
a single LLM? This work explores an orthogonal direction focusing on
post-training LLMs for autoregressive searching (i.e., an extended reasoning
process with self-reflection and self-exploration of new strategies). To
achieve this, we propose the Chain-of-Action-Thought (COAT) reasoning and a
two-stage training paradigm: 1) a small-scale format tuning stage to
internalize the COAT reasoning format and 2) a large-scale self-improvement
stage leveraging reinforcement learning. Our approach results in Satori, a 7B
LLM trained on open-source models and data. Extensive empirical evaluations
demonstrate that Satori achieves state-of-the-art performance on mathematical
reasoning benchmarks while exhibits strong generalization to out-of-domain
tasks. Code, data, and models will be fully open-sourced.