LIMO: Less is More for Reasoning
Authors: name: Yixin Ye; name: Zhen Huang; name: Yang Xiao; name: Ethan Chern; name: Shijie Xia; name: Pengfei Liu
Published: 2025-02-05 17:23:45

Abstract: We present a fundamental discovery that challenges our understanding of how
complex reasoning emerges in large language models. While conventional wisdom
suggests that sophisticated reasoning tasks demand extensive training data
(>100,000 examples), we demonstrate that complex mathematical reasoning
abilities can be effectively elicited with surprisingly few examples. Through
comprehensive experiments, our proposed model LIMO demonstrates unprecedented
performance in mathematical reasoning. With merely 817 curated training
samples, LIMO achieves 57.1% accuracy on AIME and 94.8% on MATH, improving from
previous SFT-based models' 6.5% and 59.2% respectively, while only using 1% of
the training data required by previous approaches. LIMO demonstrates
exceptional out-of-distribution generalization, achieving 40.5% absolute
improvement across 10 diverse benchmarks, outperforming models trained on 100x
more data, challenging the notion that SFT leads to memorization rather than
generalization. Based on these results, we propose the Less-Is-More Reasoning
Hypothesis (LIMO Hypothesis): In foundation models where domain knowledge has
been comprehensively encoded during pre-training, sophisticated reasoning
capabilities can emerge through minimal but precisely orchestrated
demonstrations of cognitive processes. This hypothesis posits that the
elicitation threshold for complex reasoning is determined by two key factors:
(1) the completeness of the model's encoded knowledge foundation during
pre-training, and (2) the effectiveness of post-training examples as "cognitive
templates" that show the model how to utilize its knowledge base to solve
complex reasoning tasks. To facilitate reproducibility and future research in
data-efficient reasoning, we release LIMO as a comprehensive open-source suite
at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/LIMO.