Temporal Sampling for Forgotten Reasoning in LLMs

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is intended to improve their reasoning capabilities, yet we uncover a counterintuitive effect: models often forget how to solve problems they previously answered correctly during training. We term this phenomenon Temporal Forgetting and show that it is widespread across model sizes, fine-tuning methods (both Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Fine-Tuning), and multiple reasoning benchmarks. Our analysis reveals that 6.4% to 56.1% of final errors were once solved correctly at an earlier checkpoint. Inspired by the phenomenon of Temporal Forgetting, we proposed Temporal Sampling, a simple decoding strategy that draws outputs from multiple checkpoints along the training trajectory. This approach recovers forgotten solutions without retraining or ensembling, and leads to significant improvements in reasoning performance, gains from 4 to 19 points in Pass@k and consistent gains for majority-voting and Best-of-N across several benchmarks. To make Temporal Sampling deploymentfriendly, we extend it to LoRA-adapted models. By leveraging the temporal diversity inherent in training, Temporal Sampling offers a practical, compute-efficient way to surface hidden reasoning ability and rethink how we evaluate LLMs.