Tina: Tiny Reasoning Models via LoRA
Authors: name: Shangshang Wang; name: Julian Asilis; name: Ömer Faruk Akgül; name: Enes Burak Bilgin; name: Ollie Liu; name: Willie Neiswanger
Published: 2025-04-22 10:38:00

Abstract: How cost-effectively can strong reasoning abilities be achieved in language
models? Driven by this fundamental question, we present Tina, a family of tiny
reasoning models achieved with high cost-efficiency. Notably, Tina demonstrates
that substantial reasoning performance can be developed using only minimal
resources, by applying parameter-efficient updates during reinforcement
learning (RL), using low-rank adaptation (LoRA), to an already tiny 1.5B
parameter base model. This minimalist approach produces models that achieve
reasoning performance which is competitive with, and sometimes surpasses, SOTA
RL reasoning models built upon the same base model. Crucially, this is achieved
at a tiny fraction of the computational post-training cost employed by existing
SOTA models. In fact, the best Tina model achieves a >20\% reasoning
performance increase and 43.33\% Pass@1 accuracy on AIME24, at only \$9 USD
post-training and evaluation cost (i.e., an estimated 260x cost reduction). Our
work reveals the surprising effectiveness of efficient RL reasoning via LoRA.
We validate this across multiple open-source reasoning datasets and various
ablation settings starting with a single, fixed set of hyperparameters.
Furthermore, we hypothesize that this effectiveness and efficiency stem from
LoRA rapidly adapting the model to the structural format of reasoning rewarded
by RL, while largely preserving the base model's underlying knowledge. In
service of accessibility and open research, we fully open-source all code,
training logs, and model weights \& checkpoints.