Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10751

This episode of "The AI Research Deep Dive" unpacks "Pass at k Training," a paper that offers a brilliant solution to a common AI problem: models that get stuck in a rigid, singular way of solving problems. The host explains how standard reinforcement learning rewards models for finding just one correct answer ("Pass at one"), which discourages creative exploration. Listeners will learn about the paper's simple but powerful alternative: rewarding the model if any answer in a larger batch of k attempts is correct. This one change fundamentally incentivizes the model to generate diverse and creative reasoning paths. The episode highlights the stunning headline result where this method allowed a relatively small 7-billion-parameter model to outperform giants like GPT-4o and Claude 3.7 on a complex reasoning benchmark, demonstrating that smarter training can be more impactful than simply building bigger models.