Reasoning Through Chess: How Reasoning Evolves from Data Through Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning

Lucas Dionisopoulos, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Nicklas Majamaki

Keywords: Chess, Reasoning, Reasoning Models, Language Models, Supervised Fine-Tuning, Reinforcement Learning, RLVR, Dataset Design

TL;DR: We study how your SFT training data influences downstream reasoning behavior (post RL) by training an LLM to play chess.

Abstract: How can you get a language model to reason in a task it natively struggles with?} We study how reasoning evolves in a language model -- from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL) -- by analyzing how a set of theoretically-inspired datasets impacts language model performance in chess. We find that fine-tuning a model to directly predict the best move leads to effective RL and the strongest downstream performance -- however, the RL step elicits unfaithful reasoning (reasoning inconsistent with the chosen move). Alternatively, training on multi-move trajectories yields comparable downstream performance with faithful reasoning and more stable RL. We show that RL induces a substantial positive shift in the distribution of move quality and reduces hallucination rates as a side effect. Finally, we find several SFT-checkpoint metrics -- metrics spanning evaluation performance, hallucination rates, and reasoning quality -- to be predictive of post-RL model performance. We release checkpoints and final models as well as training data, evaluations, and code which allowed us to surpass leading open-source reasoning models in chess with a 7B-parameter model.

Submission Number: 31