Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wu, Xiuping, Yu, Zhao, Cheng, Yuxin, Wong, Ngai, Ke, Liangjun, Mishra, Tapas, Katsikopoulos, Konstantinos V.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12013
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912900456644608
author Wu, Xiuping
Yu, Zhao
Cheng, Yuxin
Wong, Ngai
Ke, Liangjun
Mishra, Tapas
Katsikopoulos, Konstantinos V.
author_facet Wu, Xiuping
Yu, Zhao
Cheng, Yuxin
Wong, Ngai
Ke, Liangjun
Mishra, Tapas
Katsikopoulos, Konstantinos V.
contents Reasoning can significantly enhance the performance of Large Language Models. While recent studies have exploited behavior-related prompts adjustment to enhance reasoning, these designs remain largely intuitive and lack a systematic analysis of the underlying behavioral patterns. Motivated by this, we investigate how models' reasoning behaviors shape reasoning from the perspective of behavioral patterns. We observe that models exhibit adaptive distributions of reasoning behaviors when responding to specific types of questions, and that structurally injecting these patterns can substantially influence the quality of the models' reasoning processes and outcomes. Building on these findings, we propose two optimization methods that require no parameter updates: InjectCorrect and InjectRLOpt. InjectCorrect guides the model by imitating behavioral patterns derived from its own past correct answers. InjectRLOpt learns a value function from historical behavior-pattern data and, via our proposed Reliability-Aware Softmax Policy, generates behavioral injectant during inference to steer the reasoning process. Our experiments demonstrate that both methods can improve model performance across various reasoning tasks without requiring any modifications to model parameters, achieving gains of up to 5.34% and 8.67%, respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_12013
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle InjectRBP: Steering Large Language Model Reasoning Behavior via Pattern Injection
Wu, Xiuping
Yu, Zhao
Cheng, Yuxin
Wong, Ngai
Ke, Liangjun
Mishra, Tapas
Katsikopoulos, Konstantinos V.
Artificial Intelligence
Reasoning can significantly enhance the performance of Large Language Models. While recent studies have exploited behavior-related prompts adjustment to enhance reasoning, these designs remain largely intuitive and lack a systematic analysis of the underlying behavioral patterns. Motivated by this, we investigate how models' reasoning behaviors shape reasoning from the perspective of behavioral patterns. We observe that models exhibit adaptive distributions of reasoning behaviors when responding to specific types of questions, and that structurally injecting these patterns can substantially influence the quality of the models' reasoning processes and outcomes. Building on these findings, we propose two optimization methods that require no parameter updates: InjectCorrect and InjectRLOpt. InjectCorrect guides the model by imitating behavioral patterns derived from its own past correct answers. InjectRLOpt learns a value function from historical behavior-pattern data and, via our proposed Reliability-Aware Softmax Policy, generates behavioral injectant during inference to steer the reasoning process. Our experiments demonstrate that both methods can improve model performance across various reasoning tasks without requiring any modifications to model parameters, achieving gains of up to 5.34% and 8.67%, respectively.
title InjectRBP: Steering Large Language Model Reasoning Behavior via Pattern Injection
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12013