Parshin Shojaee

Recent progress in large language models has led to the emergence of reasoning models, which have shown strong performance on complex reasoning tasks through specialized reasoning-based fine-tuning procedures. While these methods reliably improve pass@1 accuracy, prior works have observed that they face with a coverage shrinkage phenomenon, where pass@k degrades relative to the base model. In this paper, we investigate the reasoning shrinkage arise under SFT-based post-training. We hypothesize that this behavior is driven by properties of the fine-tuning data, specifically related to decision points or ``forks in the road'' scenarios where model faces with indecipherable patterns with multiple valid reasoning paths. To test this hypothesis, we design controlled case studies that simulate such decision-point settings, spanning indecipherable nodes in graph branching, and reasoning styles to solve a problem. By tracking post-training dynamics in these settings, we find that the shrinkage phenomenon is tightly correlated with the prevalence of decision-point scenarios in the training data. We also demonstrate that this shrinkage behavior can be partially mitigated through targeted data synthesis design of decision-points, and a more systematic diversity-encouraging decoding mechanism. Our findings identify data-centric factors as a key driver of shrinkage in reasoning models and highlight diversity-aware designs as an effective lever for controlling it.