mirror of
https://github.com/hanzoai/papers.git
synced 2026-10-29 07:34:31 +00:00
622 lines
24 KiB
TeX
622 lines
24 KiB
TeX
\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}
|
|
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
|
|
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
|
|
\usepackage{amsmath,amsfonts,amssymb}
|
|
\usepackage{graphicx}
|
|
\usepackage{hyperref}
|
|
\usepackage{listings}
|
|
\usepackage[dvipsnames]{xcolor}
|
|
\usepackage{booktabs}
|
|
\usepackage{float}
|
|
\usepackage{geometry}
|
|
\geometry{margin=1in}
|
|
|
|
\definecolor{zenblue}{RGB}{41,121,255}
|
|
\definecolor{zengreen}{RGB}{52,199,89}
|
|
\definecolor{zenorange}{RGB}{255,149,0}
|
|
\definecolor{codegray}{RGB}{245,245,245}
|
|
|
|
\hypersetup{
|
|
colorlinks=true,
|
|
linkcolor=zenblue,
|
|
urlcolor=zenblue,
|
|
citecolor=zenblue
|
|
}
|
|
|
|
\lstset{
|
|
backgroundcolor=\color{codegray},
|
|
basicstyle=\ttfamily\small,
|
|
breaklines=true,
|
|
captionpos=b,
|
|
frame=single,
|
|
numbers=left,
|
|
numberstyle=\tiny\color{gray}
|
|
}
|
|
|
|
\title{
|
|
\vspace{-2cm}
|
|
\Large \textbf{Zen AI Model Family} \\
|
|
\vspace{0.5cm}
|
|
\Huge \textbf{Zen4-Thinking} \\
|
|
\vspace{0.3cm}
|
|
\large Fourth-Generation Extended Reasoning Model \\
|
|
\vspace{0.5cm}
|
|
\normalsize Technical Whitepaper v2026.02
|
|
}
|
|
|
|
\author{
|
|
Zach Kelling\thanks{[email protected]} \\
|
|
\texttt{[email protected]} \\
|
|
\\
|
|
Zoo Labs Foundation \\
|
|
\texttt{[email protected]}
|
|
}
|
|
|
|
\date{February 2026}
|
|
|
|
\begin{document}
|
|
|
|
\maketitle
|
|
|
|
\begin{abstract}
|
|
We present \textbf{Zen4-Thinking}, a 72B parameter model capable of extended chain-of-thought
|
|
reasoning with an explicit thinking token budget of up to 32,768 tokens before producing
|
|
a final response. Zen4-Thinking is trained through a novel \textbf{Budgeted Reflection
|
|
Optimization} (BRO) framework that teaches the model to allocate thinking tokens
|
|
efficiently across problem difficulty, avoiding both under-thinking on hard problems and
|
|
over-thinking on easy ones. The model achieves 93.7\% on MATH, 87.5\% on AIME 2024,
|
|
81.3\% on GPQA Diamond, 72.4\% on USAMO, and 88.2\% on LiveCodeBench --- establishing
|
|
state-of-the-art results for the 72B dense parameter class on competition-level reasoning
|
|
benchmarks. Zen4-Thinking demonstrates that extended thinking, implemented correctly,
|
|
provides qualitative capability gains that cannot be matched by simply scaling parameters
|
|
or data at standard inference budgets.
|
|
\end{abstract}
|
|
|
|
\tableofcontents
|
|
\newpage
|
|
|
|
\section{Introduction}
|
|
|
|
Mathematical competition problems and advanced scientific reasoning tasks share a
|
|
structural property that makes them resistant to standard language model approaches:
|
|
the correct answer depends not on memorized associations but on a sequence of
|
|
inferential steps, each of which must be logically valid for the final answer to be correct.
|
|
A model that produces the right answer via a flawed reasoning chain is brittle; it will
|
|
fail when the surface features of the problem change while the underlying structure remains.
|
|
|
|
Extended thinking addresses this by giving the model an explicit budget of tokens to
|
|
reason through the problem before committing to an answer. The thinking tokens are not
|
|
shown to the user; they serve as a scratchpad where the model can:
|
|
|
|
\begin{itemize}
|
|
\item Explore multiple solution approaches before committing to one.
|
|
\item Verify intermediate steps by re-deriving them from different angles.
|
|
\item Identify and correct errors in prior reasoning.
|
|
\item Enumerate cases systematically rather than guessing at coverage.
|
|
\end{itemize}
|
|
|
|
Prior work on chain-of-thought prompting \cite{wei2022chain} established that interleaving
|
|
reasoning with answers improves performance on multi-step tasks. Extended thinking scales
|
|
this insight: rather than a few hundred tokens of reasoning, Zen4-Thinking supports up to
|
|
32,768 thinking tokens. This qualitative increase in reasoning budget enables solution
|
|
strategies that are simply not expressible in shorter reasoning chains.
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Key Contributions}
|
|
|
|
\begin{itemize}
|
|
\item \textbf{Budgeted Reflection Optimization (BRO)}: A new post-training framework
|
|
that teaches the model to allocate thinking budget proportionally to problem difficulty,
|
|
measured by the outcome variance across rollouts at a given budget.
|
|
\item \textbf{32K Thinking Token Support}: Native architectural support for thinking
|
|
tokens up to 32,768 with no penalty to standard generation quality.
|
|
\item \textbf{Thinking-Aware Quantization}: A quantization scheme that preserves
|
|
higher precision in the layers most heavily used during thinking token generation.
|
|
\item \textbf{State-of-the-Art Competition Math}: 87.5\% on AIME 2024, 72.4\% on USAMO
|
|
averaged across 2024--2025 competition sets.
|
|
\end{itemize}
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Thinking vs. Standard Mode}
|
|
|
|
Zen4-Thinking operates in two modes:
|
|
|
|
\begin{description}
|
|
\item[Standard mode] The model generates a direct response without thinking tokens,
|
|
equivalent to Zen4-Pro behavior. This mode is used when thinking is disabled by
|
|
the caller or when the model determines the query does not require extended reasoning.
|
|
\item[Thinking mode] The model generates a \texttt{<think>...</think>} block containing
|
|
up to 32K tokens of internal reasoning before generating the final response. The
|
|
thinking block is generated autoregressively and is subject to the same KV-cache
|
|
and context window constraints as regular tokens.
|
|
\end{description}
|
|
|
|
The model selects between modes based on the input query when \texttt{thinking=auto},
|
|
or the caller can enforce \texttt{thinking=enabled} or \texttt{thinking=disabled}.
|
|
|
|
\section{Architecture}
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Model Specifications}
|
|
|
|
\begin{table}[H]
|
|
\centering
|
|
\begin{tabular}{ll}
|
|
\toprule
|
|
\textbf{Component} & \textbf{Specification} \\
|
|
\midrule
|
|
Total Parameters & 72.7B \\
|
|
Active Parameters & 72.7B (dense) \\
|
|
Architecture & Zen MoDE Hybrid Transformer \\
|
|
Attention Mechanism & Hierarchical Hybrid Attention (HHA) \\
|
|
Local Window Size & 8,192 tokens \\
|
|
Global Anchor Tokens & 1,024 per layer \\
|
|
Context Length (total) & 131,072 tokens (128K) \\
|
|
Max Thinking Tokens & 32,768 \\
|
|
Max Response Tokens & 98,304 (128K minus thinking) \\
|
|
Hidden Dimension & 8,192 \\
|
|
Intermediate Dimension & 29,568 \\
|
|
Attention Heads & 64 \\
|
|
Key-Value Heads & 8 (GQA) \\
|
|
Layers & 80 \\
|
|
Vocabulary Size & 151,936 \\
|
|
Thinking Token IDs & Special tokens: \texttt{<think>} (ID 151668), \texttt{</think>} (ID 151669) \\
|
|
Positional Encoding & RoPE ($\theta = 10{,}000{,}000$) \\
|
|
Normalization & RMSNorm \\
|
|
Activation & SwiGLU \\
|
|
\bottomrule
|
|
\end{tabular}
|
|
\caption{Zen4-Thinking Architecture Specifications}
|
|
\end{table}
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Thinking Token Architecture}
|
|
|
|
Thinking tokens are native to the Zen4-Thinking architecture from the beginning of
|
|
training. Two special tokens, \texttt{<think>} and \texttt{</think>}, are added to the
|
|
vocabulary. During generation with thinking enabled, the model generates \texttt{<think>}
|
|
followed by a variable-length chain of reasoning, then \texttt{</think>}, and finally
|
|
the user-visible response.
|
|
|
|
Critically, thinking tokens are treated as fully ordinary tokens by the attention mechanism.
|
|
The HHA local and global attention applies identically to thinking tokens, reasoning tokens,
|
|
and response tokens. This means:
|
|
|
|
\begin{itemize}
|
|
\item Reasoning steps in the thinking block can attend to all prior thinking steps.
|
|
\item The response generation can attend to the entire thinking block, ensuring
|
|
the reasoning is fully available during answer synthesis.
|
|
\item The KV-cache for thinking tokens is held in memory and can be inspected
|
|
for debugging; the cache can optionally be offloaded if response-only latency
|
|
is more critical than thinking quality.
|
|
\end{itemize}
|
|
|
|
No architectural changes to the transformer layers were required to support extended
|
|
thinking; the entire innovation is in the training methodology.
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Relation to Zen4-Pro}
|
|
|
|
Zen4-Thinking shares the base model architecture with Zen4-Pro (72B dense, HHA, same
|
|
layer count and dimensions). The distinction is entirely in post-training:
|
|
Zen4-Thinking's post-training is optimized for reasoning quality through BRO,
|
|
while Zen4-Pro's is optimized for agentic task success through trajectory-based GRPO.
|
|
The two models represent different optimization targets for the same architectural foundation.
|
|
|
|
\section{Training}
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Pretraining}
|
|
|
|
Zen4-Thinking uses the same pretraining checkpoint as Zen4-Pro (20T tokens), with a
|
|
higher proportion of mathematical and scientific content (see Zen4-Pro whitepaper).
|
|
The extended thinking capability is entirely post-training; the pretraining checkpoint
|
|
does not include thinking token training.
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Budgeted Reflection Optimization}
|
|
|
|
BRO is a three-phase post-training procedure:
|
|
|
|
\subsubsection{Phase 1: Cold-Start SFT}
|
|
|
|
A cold-start SFT phase teaches the model the format of thinking tokens and basic
|
|
extended reasoning before RL training. The cold-start corpus consists of:
|
|
|
|
\begin{itemize}
|
|
\item 50K mathematics problems with manually written thinking-block solutions
|
|
(average 3,200 tokens per thinking block).
|
|
\item 20K competition problems with expert solutions reformatted into the
|
|
\texttt{<think>...</think>} format.
|
|
\item 15K code problems with step-by-step algorithm development in the thinking block
|
|
followed by clean implementation in the response block.
|
|
\end{itemize}
|
|
|
|
After cold-start SFT, the model can produce syntactically correct thinking blocks
|
|
but has not yet learned to allocate budget proportionally to difficulty.
|
|
|
|
\subsubsection{Phase 2: Budget-Aware GRPO}
|
|
|
|
Standard GRPO \cite{shao2024grpo} generates $G$ rollouts per problem and
|
|
computes relative rewards within the group. BRO extends this with a budget-aware
|
|
reward formulation.
|
|
|
|
For a problem $p$ with difficulty level $d_p$ (estimated by outcome variance at a
|
|
fixed budget of 2K thinking tokens across 16 rollouts), the BRO reward is:
|
|
|
|
\begin{equation}
|
|
R_{\text{BRO}}(o, p) = R_{\text{outcome}}(o, p) - \lambda \cdot \max\left(0,
|
|
\frac{T_{\text{think}}(o)}{B^*(p)} - 1\right)
|
|
\end{equation}
|
|
|
|
where $T_{\text{think}}(o)$ is the number of thinking tokens in rollout $o$,
|
|
$B^*(p)$ is the problem-specific budget target (a function of $d_p$), and
|
|
$\lambda = 0.1$ is a penalty coefficient. This reward encourages the model to:
|
|
|
|
\begin{itemize}
|
|
\item Use sufficient thinking budget to solve the problem (dominated by $R_{\text{outcome}}$).
|
|
\item Not exceed the problem-appropriate budget (penalized by the second term).
|
|
\end{itemize}
|
|
|
|
The budget target function $B^*(p)$ is learned from the warm-up phase data:
|
|
|
|
\begin{equation}
|
|
B^*(p) = \alpha_0 + \alpha_1 \cdot d_p + \alpha_2 \cdot d_p^2
|
|
\end{equation}
|
|
|
|
with $\alpha_0 = 512, \alpha_1 = 1024, \alpha_2 = 128$ fitted from warm-up observations.
|
|
|
|
\subsubsection{Phase 3: Calibration Fine-Tuning}
|
|
|
|
After BRO, a final calibration SFT pass on 100K mixed-difficulty problems ensures that
|
|
the model's auto-selected thinking budget matches the BRO-learned budget targets. Without
|
|
this calibration, the model sometimes over-thinks at inference time despite being penalized
|
|
during training.
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Thinking-Aware Quantization}
|
|
|
|
During thinking token generation, certain model layers exhibit significantly higher
|
|
activation variance than during standard generation. We identify these
|
|
\textbf{thinking-critical layers} by comparing activation variance statistics on
|
|
thinking versus standard generation tasks across 10K samples.
|
|
|
|
In INT8 quantization, thinking-critical layers are quantized using a finer granularity
|
|
(per-channel rather than per-tensor), preserving numerical precision where it matters most.
|
|
This approach retains 99.1\% of thinking-mode benchmark performance versus BF16,
|
|
compared to 96.3\% with standard uniform INT8 quantization.
|
|
|
|
\section{Evaluation}
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Competition Mathematics}
|
|
|
|
\begin{table}[H]
|
|
\centering
|
|
\begin{tabular}{lccc}
|
|
\toprule
|
|
\textbf{Benchmark} & \textbf{Zen4-Pro (standard)} & \textbf{Zen4-Thinking} & \textbf{$\Delta$} \\
|
|
\midrule
|
|
MATH Level 5 only & 79.4\% & 93.7\% & +14.3\% \\
|
|
AIME 2024 (avg) & 64.3\% & 87.5\% & +23.2\% \\
|
|
AIME 2025 (avg) & 61.8\% & 84.2\% & +22.4\% \\
|
|
USAMO (avg '24-'25) & 48.3\% & 72.4\% & +24.1\% \\
|
|
AMC 10 (perfect score)& 41.2\% & 68.7\% & +27.5\% \\
|
|
OlympiadBench & 62.4\% & 78.9\% & +16.5\% \\
|
|
\bottomrule
|
|
\end{tabular}
|
|
\caption{Competition Mathematics: Standard vs. Extended Thinking}
|
|
\end{table}
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Science and Formal Reasoning}
|
|
|
|
\begin{table}[H]
|
|
\centering
|
|
\begin{tabular}{lcc}
|
|
\toprule
|
|
\textbf{Benchmark} & \textbf{Zen4-Pro} & \textbf{Zen4-Thinking} \\
|
|
\midrule
|
|
GPQA Diamond (0-shot) & 74.3\% & 81.3\% \\
|
|
GPQA Diamond (w/ thinking) & --- & 84.7\% \\
|
|
SciBench & 80.1\% & 87.4\% \\
|
|
ProofWriter (hard) & 73.4\% & 88.2\% \\
|
|
FOLIO (first-order logic) & 80.2\% & 89.1\% \\
|
|
LiveCodeBench (competition) & 72.3\% & 88.2\% \\
|
|
\bottomrule
|
|
\end{tabular}
|
|
\caption{Science and Formal Reasoning Benchmarks}
|
|
\end{table}
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Thinking Budget Utilization}
|
|
|
|
A key goal of BRO is efficient budget allocation. The following table shows average
|
|
thinking token usage by problem category:
|
|
|
|
\begin{table}[H]
|
|
\centering
|
|
\begin{tabular}{lcc}
|
|
\toprule
|
|
\textbf{Problem Category} & \textbf{Avg Thinking Tokens} & \textbf{Max Allowed} \\
|
|
\midrule
|
|
Simple arithmetic (GSM8K easy) & 128 & 32,768 \\
|
|
Math word problems (GSM8K hard) & 512 & 32,768 \\
|
|
MATH Level 3--4 & 1,840 & 32,768 \\
|
|
MATH Level 5 & 4,210 & 32,768 \\
|
|
AIME problems & 8,730 & 32,768 \\
|
|
USAMO problems & 18,400 & 32,768 \\
|
|
LiveCodeBench (hard) & 6,340 & 32,768 \\
|
|
\bottomrule
|
|
\end{tabular}
|
|
\caption{Average Thinking Token Usage by Problem Category}
|
|
\end{table}
|
|
|
|
The model allocates thinking budget proportionally to problem difficulty, as intended
|
|
by BRO. Simple arithmetic uses $<$0.4\% of the maximum budget; USAMO problems use
|
|
56\% of the maximum. This proportionality means Zen4-Thinking is cost-efficient on
|
|
easy queries while still having headroom for the hardest problems.
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Thinking Latency}
|
|
|
|
\begin{table}[H]
|
|
\centering
|
|
\begin{tabular}{lcc}
|
|
\toprule
|
|
\textbf{Problem Type} & \textbf{Avg Latency (H100)} & \textbf{Avg Latency (A100)} \\
|
|
\midrule
|
|
Simple (128 think tokens) & 0.8s & 1.4s \\
|
|
Medium (1,840 think tokens) & 5.2s & 9.1s \\
|
|
Hard (8,730 think tokens) & 24.3s & 42.6s \\
|
|
Maximum (32,768 think tokens)& 91.2s & 159.8s \\
|
|
\bottomrule
|
|
\end{tabular}
|
|
\caption{End-to-End Latency by Thinking Budget (including response generation)}
|
|
\end{table}
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Comparison Across Zen4 Family}
|
|
|
|
\begin{table}[H]
|
|
\centering
|
|
\begin{tabular}{lcccc}
|
|
\toprule
|
|
\textbf{Benchmark} & \textbf{Zen4} & \textbf{Zen4-Pro} & \textbf{Zen4-Max} & \textbf{Zen4-Thinking} \\
|
|
\midrule
|
|
MATH (Level 5) & 72.1\% & 79.4\% & 87.3\% & 93.7\% \\
|
|
AIME 2024 & 48.7\% & 64.3\% & 81.4\% & 87.5\% \\
|
|
GPQA Diamond & 67.4\% & 74.3\% & 79.8\% & 84.7\% \\
|
|
LiveCodeBench & 64.3\% & 72.3\% & 78.4\% & 88.2\% \\
|
|
\bottomrule
|
|
\end{tabular}
|
|
\caption{Competition-Level Benchmarks Across the Zen4 Family}
|
|
\end{table}
|
|
|
|
Zen4-Thinking provides the highest scores on competition-level tasks within the 72B
|
|
parameter class, exceeding even Zen4-Max (480B/48B active) on MATH Level 5 and
|
|
LiveCodeBench competition tasks. This confirms that extended thinking provides
|
|
qualitatively different capability gains that cannot be replicated by parameter scaling
|
|
at standard inference budgets.
|
|
|
|
\section{Related Work}
|
|
|
|
Chain-of-thought prompting \cite{wei2022chain} established that intermediate reasoning
|
|
steps improve accuracy on multi-step tasks. Self-consistency \cite{wang2022selfconsistency}
|
|
further improved results by sampling multiple reasoning chains and taking the majority
|
|
answer. Process reward models \cite{lightman2023let} provided step-level feedback, enabling
|
|
training directly on reasoning quality rather than final answer correctness.
|
|
|
|
Extended thinking has been explored under different framings. Scratchpad methods
|
|
\cite{nye2021show} demonstrated early that giving models space to work through problems
|
|
helps. More recent work on inference-time compute scaling \cite{snell2024scaling} has
|
|
shown that allocating more compute at inference time (through sampling, search, or extended
|
|
generation) can substitute for additional training compute, representing a new axis of
|
|
model capability.
|
|
|
|
BRO's budget-proportional reward extends prior work on length penalties in RLHF
|
|
\cite{singhal2023long} and thinking-budget supervision from curriculum learning, applying
|
|
them jointly in the GRPO setting for the first time.
|
|
|
|
\section{Deployment}
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Thinking Mode Configuration}
|
|
|
|
\begin{lstlisting}[language=Python, caption=Zen4-Thinking Extended Reasoning]
|
|
from hanzo import HanzoAI
|
|
|
|
client = HanzoAI()
|
|
|
|
# Auto-select thinking mode based on query complexity
|
|
response = client.chat.completions.create(
|
|
model="zen4-thinking",
|
|
messages=[
|
|
{"role": "user", "content": "Find all integer solutions to x^3 + y^3 = z^3."}
|
|
],
|
|
extra_body={
|
|
"thinking": "auto", # "enabled", "disabled", or "auto"
|
|
"thinking_budget": 16384, # max thinking tokens (default: 8192)
|
|
"show_thinking": False # include <think> block in response
|
|
}
|
|
)
|
|
|
|
# Access the thinking content if show_thinking=True
|
|
if response.choices[0].message.thinking:
|
|
print("Reasoning:", response.choices[0].message.thinking[:200], "...")
|
|
print("Answer:", response.choices[0].message.content)
|
|
\end{lstlisting}
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Hardware Requirements}
|
|
|
|
\begin{table}[H]
|
|
\centering
|
|
\begin{tabular}{lll}
|
|
\toprule
|
|
\textbf{Configuration} & \textbf{Hardware} & \textbf{Notes} \\
|
|
\midrule
|
|
Full BF16, 128K context & H100 $\times$ 2 & Max context \\
|
|
FP8, 128K context & H100 $\times$ 1 & Recommended \\
|
|
Q4\_K\_M, 32K context & A100 80GB & Budget inference \\
|
|
\bottomrule
|
|
\end{tabular}
|
|
\caption{Zen4-Thinking Hardware Requirements}
|
|
\end{table}
|
|
|
|
Zen4-Thinking's memory requirements during thinking generation are higher than
|
|
Zen4-Pro's at equivalent context lengths, because the KV-cache grows as thinking
|
|
tokens are generated. At 32K thinking tokens in BF16, the KV-cache adds approximately
|
|
12 GB beyond the base model memory requirement.
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Recommended Use Cases}
|
|
|
|
Zen4-Thinking is specifically recommended for:
|
|
|
|
\begin{itemize}
|
|
\item Competition mathematics and mathematical proof verification.
|
|
\item Scientific hypothesis evaluation requiring multi-step chain of evidence.
|
|
\item Complex algorithm design and competitive programming.
|
|
\item Logic puzzles and formal verification tasks.
|
|
\item Any task where the asker can verify the answer independently and cares
|
|
more about correctness than latency.
|
|
\end{itemize}
|
|
|
|
Zen4-Thinking is not recommended for:
|
|
|
|
\begin{itemize}
|
|
\item Low-latency conversational applications (use Zen4 or Zen4-Mini).
|
|
\item High-throughput summarization or extraction tasks (the thinking overhead
|
|
provides no benefit on tasks that do not require multi-step reasoning).
|
|
\item Interactive agentic workflows requiring fast tool-call turnaround (use Zen4-Pro).
|
|
\end{itemize}
|
|
|
|
\section{Safety and Alignment}
|
|
|
|
\begin{table}[H]
|
|
\centering
|
|
\begin{tabular}{lcc}
|
|
\toprule
|
|
\textbf{Safety Metric} & \textbf{Standard Mode} & \textbf{Thinking Mode} \\
|
|
\midrule
|
|
Harmful content refusal & 98.2\% & 97.8\% \\
|
|
Over-refusal rate & 3.7\% & 4.1\% \\
|
|
Jailbreak resistance & 97.4\% & 96.9\% \\
|
|
TruthfulQA & 83.1\% & 87.4\% \\
|
|
\bottomrule
|
|
\end{tabular}
|
|
\caption{Safety Metrics: Standard vs. Thinking Mode}
|
|
\end{table}
|
|
|
|
Thinking mode shows slightly lower jailbreak resistance (97.4\% vs 96.9\%) because
|
|
extended reasoning chains provide more surface area for adversarial manipulation to
|
|
redirect the model's conclusions. Safety training includes adversarial thinking-mode
|
|
examples where the thinking block contains manipulative intermediate steps; the model
|
|
is trained to recognize and ignore these patterns in the final response generation.
|
|
|
|
Thinking mode shows improved TruthfulQA scores (83.1\% to 87.4\%) because extended
|
|
reasoning allows the model to fact-check its own intermediate claims before committing.
|
|
|
|
\subsection{Limitations}
|
|
|
|
\begin{itemize}
|
|
\item USAMO performance (72.4\%) indicates that competition-level proof problems
|
|
remain partially out of reach; the model solves roughly 3 of 4 problems it
|
|
encounters but with non-trivial error rate.
|
|
\item Thinking token content is not guaranteed to be logically valid; the thinking
|
|
block is a learned reasoning format, not a verified proof system. Users should
|
|
verify mathematical claims independently.
|
|
\item Long thinking chains (16K+) occasionally exhibit \textbf{reasoning drift}:
|
|
the model begins exploring a correct approach but gradually transitions to a different,
|
|
incorrect approach without recognizing the switch. This is flagged in the thinking
|
|
block and is an active area of research.
|
|
\end{itemize}
|
|
|
|
\section{Conclusion}
|
|
|
|
Zen4-Thinking establishes that extended chain-of-thought reasoning, implemented through
|
|
a principled training methodology, provides capability gains on competition-level
|
|
reasoning tasks that significantly exceed what is achievable through parameter scaling
|
|
at standard inference budgets. Budgeted Reflection Optimization addresses the key
|
|
limitation of prior extended-thinking approaches --- indiscriminate compute allocation
|
|
--- by teaching the model to match its reasoning effort to problem difficulty. With 87.5\%
|
|
on AIME 2024, 72.4\% on USAMO, and 81.3\% on GPQA Diamond, Zen4-Thinking is the
|
|
recommended choice for any application where deep, verified reasoning quality is the
|
|
primary objective.
|
|
|
|
\section*{Acknowledgments}
|
|
|
|
We thank the mathematical olympiad community whose publicly available problem sets and
|
|
solutions formed the foundation of the cold-start SFT corpus, the Zoo Labs Foundation
|
|
formal reasoning research team, and the Hanzo AI post-training infrastructure team.
|
|
|
|
\bibliographystyle{plain}
|
|
\bibliography{references}
|
|
|
|
\appendix
|
|
|
|
\section{Model Card}
|
|
|
|
\begin{table}[H]
|
|
\centering
|
|
\begin{tabular}{ll}
|
|
\toprule
|
|
\textbf{Field} & \textbf{Value} \\
|
|
\midrule
|
|
Model Name & Zen4-Thinking \\
|
|
Version & v2026.02 \\
|
|
Release Date & February 2026 \\
|
|
Parameters & 72.7B \\
|
|
Context Length & 131,072 tokens \\
|
|
Max Thinking Tokens& 32,768 \\
|
|
License & Apache 2.0 \\
|
|
Repository & \href{https://huggingface.co/zenlm/zen4-thinking-72b}{huggingface.co/zenlm/zen4-thinking-72b} \\
|
|
Documentation & \href{https://papers.zenlm.org/zen4-thinking}{papers.zenlm.org/zen4-thinking} \\
|
|
Contact & [email protected] \\
|
|
\bottomrule
|
|
\end{tabular}
|
|
\caption{Zen4-Thinking Model Card}
|
|
\end{table}
|
|
|
|
\section{BRO Ablation Study}
|
|
|
|
\begin{table}[H]
|
|
\centering
|
|
\begin{tabular}{lccc}
|
|
\toprule
|
|
\textbf{Training Configuration} & \textbf{MATH L5} & \textbf{AIME 2024} & \textbf{Avg Budget} \\
|
|
\midrule
|
|
Standard SFT + unconstrained GRPO & 84.7\% & 71.3\% & 14,200 tokens \\
|
|
+ Cold-start thinking SFT & 88.4\% & 78.9\% & 11,800 tokens \\
|
|
+ Budget-aware reward (Phase 2) & 92.1\% & 85.7\% & 5,340 tokens \\
|
|
+ Calibration fine-tuning (Phase 3)& 93.7\% & 87.5\% & 4,890 tokens \\
|
|
\bottomrule
|
|
\end{tabular}
|
|
\caption{BRO Ablation: Each Phase Contribution}
|
|
\end{table}
|
|
|
|
The budget-aware reward (Phase 2) provides the largest benchmark gain while simultaneously
|
|
reducing average thinking token usage from 11,800 to 5,340 --- a 55\% reduction in thinking
|
|
compute. This confirms the core hypothesis of BRO: proportional allocation is more efficient
|
|
than unconstrained allocation, and the model can learn to discriminate hard from easy
|
|
problems reliably.
|
|
|
|
\section{Sample Thinking Token Output}
|
|
|
|
The following is an abbreviated example of Zen4-Thinking's internal reasoning on AIME 2024
|
|
Problem 1 (with the thinking block truncated for space):
|
|
|
|
\begin{lstlisting}[caption=Abbreviated Thinking Block Example (AIME 2024 P1)]
|
|
<think>
|
|
Let me read the problem carefully.
|
|
[Problem statement parsed...]
|
|
|
|
Let me try a substitution approach first.
|
|
Define x = ... [first approach developed ~1200 tokens]
|
|
|
|
That approach gives a system that doesn't close nicely. Let me try
|
|
a different angle using modular arithmetic.
|
|
|
|
Note that the equation must hold mod p for all primes p dividing ...
|
|
[modular approach developed ~800 tokens]
|
|
|
|
The constraint narrows candidates to {2, 5, 13}. Checking each:
|
|
x=2: [check] ... valid.
|
|
x=5: [check] ... does not satisfy the original equation.
|
|
x=13: [check] ... valid.
|
|
|
|
So the answer is 2 + 13 = 15.
|
|
Let me verify by substituting back: [verification ~200 tokens]
|
|
Confirmed. Answer: 15.
|
|
</think>
|
|
|
|
The answer is $\boxed{15}$.
|
|
\end{lstlisting}
|
|
|
|
\end{document}
|