Halil Alperen Gozeten — accepted AI-conference papers

2026

Continuous Chain of Thought Enables Parallel Exploration and Reasoning

Halil Alperen Gozeten, Muhammed Emrullah Ildiz, Xuechen Zhang, Hrayr Harutyunyan, Ankit Singh Rawat, Samet Oymak

ICLR 2026poster

Modern language models generate chain-of-thought traces by autoregressively sampling tokens from a finite vocabulary. While this discrete sampling has achieved remarkable success, conducting chain-of-thought with continuously-valued tokens (CoT2) offers a richer and more expressive alternative. Our…

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2026

Learning to Correct: Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Attempt Chain-of-Thought

Muhammed Emrullah Ildiz, Halil Alperen Gozeten, Ege Onur Taga, Samet Oymak

ICML 2026poster

State-of-the-art reasoning models can utilize long chain-of-thought to solve sophisticated coding and math problems. During this process, the model often attemps at a solution multiple times by utilizing verification and self-reflection capabilities. In this work, we view a long CoT as a process whe…

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2025

High-dimensional Analysis of Knowledge Distillation: Weak-to-Strong Generalization and Scaling Laws

Muhammed Emrullah Ildiz, Halil Alperen Gozeten, Ege Onur Taga, Marco Mondelli, Samet Oymak

ICLR 2025spotlight

A growing number of machine learning scenarios rely on knowledge distillation where one uses the output of a surrogate model as labels to supervise the training of a target model. In this work, we provide a sharp characterization of this process for ridgeless, high-dimensional regression, under two…

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2025

Test-Time Training Provably Improves Transformers as In-context Learners

Halil Alperen Gozeten, Muhammed Emrullah Ildiz, Xuechen Zhang, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Marco Mondelli, Samet Oymak

ICML 2025poster

Test-time training (TTT) methods explicitly update the weights of a model to adapt to the specific test instance, and they have found success in a variety of settings, including most recently language modeling and reasoning. To demystify this success, we investigate a gradient-based TTT algorithm fo…

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