# MOTIF: Modular Thinking via Reinforcement Fine-tuning in LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02851 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02851/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reinforcement learning for reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 22 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reinforcement learning for reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reinforcement-learning-for-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [s1: Simple test-time scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19393/) (2025)
- [OpenAI o1 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16720/) (2024)
- [Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11805/) (2023)
- [Mixture-of-Agents Enhances Large Language Model Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04692/) (2024)
- [Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09567/) (2025)
- [Leave No Context Behind: Efficient Infinite Context Transformers with Infini-attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07143/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Mixture-of-Agents: Is Mixing Different Large Language Models Beneficial?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00674/) (2025)
- [InftyThink: Breaking the Length Limits of Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06692/) (2025)
- [Think Twice: Enhancing LLM Reasoning by Scaling Multi-round Test-time Thinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19855/) (2025)
- [Synthetic Data Generation & Multi-Step RL for Reasoning & Tool Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04736/) (2025)
- [SMoA: Improving Multi-agent Large Language Models with Sparse Mixture-of-Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03284/) (2024)
- [Iteration of Thought: Leveraging Inner Dialogue for Autonomous Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12618/) (2024)
- [Not All Thoughts are Generated Equal: Efficient LLM Reasoning via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11827/) (2025)
- [Infinite Retrieval: Attention Enhanced LLMs in Long-Context Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12962/) (2025)
- [Distributed Mixture-of-Agents for Edge Inference with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21200/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Self-Compacting Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23525/) (2026)
- [It's Not You, It's Clipping: A Soft Trust-Region via Probability Smoothing for LLM RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21282/) (2025)
- [CARE-RFT: Confidence-Anchored Reinforcement Finetuning for Reliable Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00085/) (2026)
- [Chained Recursive Language Models for Multi-Iteration Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05124/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) show that employing group relative policy optimization (GRPO) algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) training allows the models to use more thinking/reasoning tokens for generating better responses. However, LLMs can generate only a finite amount of tokens while maintaining attention to the previously generated tokens. This limit, also known as the context size of an LLM, is a bottleneck in LLM reasoning with arbitrarily large number of tokens. To think beyond the limit of context size, an LLM must employ a modular thinking strategy to reason over multiple rounds. In this work, we propose MOTIF: Modular Thinking via Reinforcement Finetuning -- an RL training method for generating thinking tokens in multiple rounds, effectively allowing the model to think with additional context size. We trained the open-source model Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct on GSM8K dataset via parameter efficient fine-tuning and tested its accuracy on MATH500 and AIME2024 benchmarks. Our experiments show 3.8% and 3.3% improvements over vanilla GRPO based training in the respective benchmarks. Furthermore, this improvement was achieved with only 15% of samples, thus demonstrating sample efficiency of MOTIF. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/purbeshmitra/MOTIF and https://huggingface.co/purbeshmitra/MOTIF, respectively.