CogAtom: From Cognitive Atoms to Olympiad-level Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Chen, Zhuofan, He, Jiyuan, Zhang, Yichi, Hu, Xing, Wen, Haoxing, Bai, Jun, Rong, Wenge
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Chen, Zhuofan
He, Jiyuan
Zhang, Yichi
Hu, Xing
Wen, Haoxing
Bai, Jun
Rong, Wenge
author_facet Chen, Zhuofan
He, Jiyuan
Zhang, Yichi
Hu, Xing
Wen, Haoxing
Bai, Jun
Rong, Wenge
contents Mathematical reasoning poses significant challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs) due to its demand for multi-step reasoning and abstract conceptual integration. While recent test-time scaling techniques rely heavily on high-quality, challenging problems, the scarcity of Olympiad-level math problems remains a bottleneck. We introduce CogAtom, a novel cognitive atom-based framework for synthesizing mathematically rigorous and cognitively diverse problems. Unlike prior approaches, CogAtom models problem construction as a process of selecting and recombining fundamental reasoning units, cognitive atoms, extracted from human-authored solutions. A diversity-promoting random walk algorithm enables exploration of the cognitive atom space, while a constraint-based recombination mechanism ensures logical soundness and structural validity. The combinatorial nature of the graph structure provides a near-infinite space of reasoning paths, and the walk algorithm systematically explores this space to achieve large-scale synthesis of high-quality problems; meanwhile, by controlling the number of cognitive atoms, we can precisely adjust problem difficulty, ensuring diversity, scalability, and controllability of the generated problems. Experimental results demonstrate that CogAtom outperforms existing methods in accuracy, reasoning depth, and diversity, generating problems that closely match the difficulty of AIME while exceeding it in structural variation. Our work offers a cognitively grounded pathway toward scalable, high-quality math problem generation.Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Icarus-1111/CogAtom.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_17318
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CogAtom: From Cognitive Atoms to Olympiad-level Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models
Chen, Zhuofan
He, Jiyuan
Zhang, Yichi
Hu, Xing
Wen, Haoxing
Bai, Jun
Rong, Wenge
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Mathematical reasoning poses significant challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs) due to its demand for multi-step reasoning and abstract conceptual integration. While recent test-time scaling techniques rely heavily on high-quality, challenging problems, the scarcity of Olympiad-level math problems remains a bottleneck. We introduce CogAtom, a novel cognitive atom-based framework for synthesizing mathematically rigorous and cognitively diverse problems. Unlike prior approaches, CogAtom models problem construction as a process of selecting and recombining fundamental reasoning units, cognitive atoms, extracted from human-authored solutions. A diversity-promoting random walk algorithm enables exploration of the cognitive atom space, while a constraint-based recombination mechanism ensures logical soundness and structural validity. The combinatorial nature of the graph structure provides a near-infinite space of reasoning paths, and the walk algorithm systematically explores this space to achieve large-scale synthesis of high-quality problems; meanwhile, by controlling the number of cognitive atoms, we can precisely adjust problem difficulty, ensuring diversity, scalability, and controllability of the generated problems. Experimental results demonstrate that CogAtom outperforms existing methods in accuracy, reasoning depth, and diversity, generating problems that closely match the difficulty of AIME while exceeding it in structural variation. Our work offers a cognitively grounded pathway toward scalable, high-quality math problem generation.Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Icarus-1111/CogAtom.
title CogAtom: From Cognitive Atoms to Olympiad-level Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17318