Length Penalties Make Chain-of-Thought Less Monitorable
arXiv:2607. 09786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Length-penalized reinforcement learning can shorten chain-of-thought reasoning while hiding an influence that drives the model's answer.
arXiv:2608. 03401v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models often reason at length before answering, increasing cost and latency.
arXiv:2607. 09786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Length-penalized reinforcement learning can shorten chain-of-thought reasoning while hiding an influence that drives the model's answer.
arXiv:2608. 20256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning language models trained with reinforcement learning typically operate under a fixed token budget rather than an explicitly adaptive one, which can lead to over-computation on easy problems and insufficient computation on difficult ones.
arXiv:2605. 24396v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long chains of thought (CoT) from current language models frequently contain logical gaps and unjustified leaps, limiting the gains from additional test-time compute.
arXiv:2608. 07885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning modes of language models outperform their non-reasoning counterparts on multi-step agentic tasks, but pay a 3-6x premium in output tokens on every episode -- much of it spent re-deriving procedures that are shared across episodes of the same domain.
arXiv:2607. 11266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it often incurs substantial computational costs due to over-reasoning: the generation of redundant, verbose, or irrelevant steps.
arXiv:2605.06165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) accelerates, token consumption from intermediate reasoning traces increasingly contribut...
arXiv:2608. 15445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a reward is correct on every training example yet consistent with more than one goal, a model can acquire an unintended one, a failure known as goal misgeneralization.
arXiv:2606. 24281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning language models are increasingly asked not only to answer difficult questions, but also to estimate their likelihood of success.
arXiv:2606. 02835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve performance by generating explicit intermediate reasoning traces through increased test-time compute, yet the assumption that longer reasoning is consistently beneficial remains under-examined.
The paper proposes a unified framework for test‑time reasoning methods, framing them as recursion operators—GROW, PRUNE, and BRANCH—applied to an agent’s reasoning trace. Experiments across five benchmarks and three frontier models show that BRANCH, which samples and selects among multiple reasoning paths, consistently outperforms the other operators and a single‑pass chain‑of‑thought baseline, improving accuracy by an average of 5.98 percentage points. The study also highlights the importance of paired evaluation and careful handling of scoring‑pipeline failures, as these factors can significantly alter comparative outcomes.
The paper demonstrates that the number of candidates generated during test-time scaling of large language models does not fully capture the system cost. By comparing different generation schedules (e.g., one batched call versus multiple serial calls) while keeping the total candidate count fixed, the authors show that serial calls consume significantly more GPU energy and latency. The study suggests that reporting candidate count alone is insufficient; evaluations should also include generation schedule and GPU-level metrics.
TRACES (Tagging Reasoning Steps for Adaptive Cost‑Efficient Early‑Stopping) is a lightweight framework that tags reasoning steps of large‑language models in real time, enabling adaptive, cost‑efficient early stopping during inference. By monitoring the types of steps generated, the method identifies when models shift their reasoning after arriving at a correct answer, allowing for interpretable stopping criteria. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks (MATH500, GSM8K, AIME) and knowledge benchmarks (MMLU, GPQA) show token reductions of 20–50% while preserving accuracy, with more conservative thresholds needed for harder tasks such as BeyondAIME and IMO AnswerBench.