mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

ENIGMA: The Geometry of Reasoning and Alignment in Large-Language Models

arXiv 2510.11278 ↗First posted 13 Oct 2025cs.LG cs.AI cs.CLcited by 1

On the map: LLM reasoning → Test-time compute and efficient thinking

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Abstract (arXiv)

We present Entropic Mutual-Information Geometry Large-Language Model Alignment (ENIGMA), a novel approach to Large-Language Model (LLM) training that jointly improves reasoning, alignment and robustness by treating an organisation's policies/principles as directions to move on a model's information manifold. Our single-loop trainer combines Group-Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO), an on-policy, critic-free RL method with Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-format only rewards; a Self-Supervised Alignment with Mutual Information (SAMI)-style symmetric InfoNCE auxiliary; and an entropic Sinkhorn optimal-transport regulariser on hidden-state distributions to bound geometry drift. We also introduce infoNCE metrics that specialise to a standard MI lower bound under matched negatives to measure how strongly a model's CoT encodes these policies. These metrics include a Sufficiency Index (SI) that enables the selection and creation of principles that maximise downstream performance prior to training. In our experiments using small (1B) LLMs, high-SI principles predict steadier training dynamics and improved benchmark performance over GRPO ablations. Our information-geometry analysis of trained models validates desirable structural change in the manifold. These results support our hypothesis that reasoning, alignment, and robustness are projections of a single information-geometric objective, and that models trained using ENIGMA demonstrate principled reasoning without the use of a reward model, offering a path to trusted capability

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 38 of its 60 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2025.

Builds on

38 of 60 references.

References · 38

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26 more
  1. 2017GradNorm: Gradient Normalization for Adaptive Loss Balancing in Deep Multitask Networkscited by 816
  2. 2018Computational Optimal Transportcited by 765
  3. 2024Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Spacecited by 763
  4. 2024ORPO: Monolithic Preference Optimization without Reference Modelcited by 556
  5. 2019On Variational Bounds of Mutual Informationcited by 550
  6. 2025Beyond the 80/20 Rule: High-Entropy Minority Tokens Drive Effective Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoningcited by 540
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  15. 2024Self-Supervised Alignment with Mutual Information: Learning to Follow Principles without Preference Labelscited by 18
  16. 2025It's a (Blind) Match! Towards Vision-Language Correspondence without Parallel Datacited by 13
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  18. 2025Decipher the Modality Gap in Multimodal Contrastive Learning: From Convergent Representations to Pairwise Alignmentcited by 10
  19. 2025Representation Potentials of Foundation Models for Multimodal Alignment: A Surveycited by 10
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