KAT-V1: Kwai-AutoThink Technical Report

TL;DR

KAT-V1 is an open-source 40B large language model designed to improve reasoning tasks by dynamically switching modes, utilizing novel training strategies, and demonstrating superior performance and efficiency across benchmarks and real-world applications.

Contribution

The paper introduces the AutoThink paradigm, dual-regime dataset construction, Multi-Token Prediction knowledge distillation, and Step-SRPO reinforcement learning, advancing reasoning efficiency and effectiveness in large language models.

Findings

KAT-V1 outperforms state-of-the-art models on reasoning benchmarks.

KAT reduces token usage while maintaining high accuracy.

Deployment in Kwaipilot enhances real-world coding workflows.

Abstract

We present Kwaipilot-AutoThink (KAT), an open-source 40B large language model developed to address the overthinking problem in reasoning-intensive tasks, where an automatic thinking training paradigm is proposed to dynamically switch between reasoning and non-reasoning modes based on task complexity. Specifically, first, we construct the dual-regime dataset based on a novel tagging pipeline and a multi-agent synthesis strategy, and then we apply Multi-Token Prediction (MTP)-enhanced knowledge distillation, enabling efficient and fine-grained reasoning transfer with minimal pretraining cost. Besides, we implement a cold-start initialization strategy that introduces mode-selection priors using majority-vote signals and intent-aware prompting. Finally, we propose Step-SRPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm that incorporates intermediate supervision into the GRPO framework, offering structured guidance over both reasoning-mode selection and response accuracy. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that KAT consistently matches or even outperforms current state-of-the-art models, including DeepSeek-R1-0528 and Qwen3-235B-A22B, across a wide range of reasoning-intensive tasks while reducing token usage. Notably, KAT outperforms all open-source models and even surpasses o3-mini on the leakage-controlled LiveCodeBench Pro. Beyond academic evaluation, KAT has been successfully deployed in Kwaipilot (i.e., Kuaishou's internal coding assistant), where it improves real-world development workflows with high accuracy, efficiency, and controllable reasoning behaviors. Moreover, we are actively training a 200B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 40B active parameters, and early results already show significant gains, further demonstrating the scalability of the AutoThink paradigm.