The paper surveys efficient reasoning in large language models, contrasting fast intuitive (System 1) and slow deep (System 2) reasoning. It analyzes why System 2 is computationally costly yet more accurate, and why System 1 is efficient but less effective. The survey covers causes of inefficiency, patterns of reasoning behavior, and potential solutions to balance performance and computational budgets, offering actionable insights and an open‑source repository for ongoing research.
By Rui Wang, Hongru Wang, Boyang Xue, Jianhui Pang, Shudong Liu, Yi Chen, Jiahao Qiu, Derek Fai Wong, Heng Ji, Kam-Fai Wong
arXiv:2505. 12992v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining.
By Baohao Liao, Hanze Dong, Yuhui Xu, Doyen Sahoo, Christof Monz, Junnan Li, Caiming Xiong
The paper introduces CARE, a contrastive accuracy reward estimation method that adaptively adjusts reasoning length for large language models. By comparing beneficial length adjustments from online sampled responses, CARE applies adaptive length rewards within Group Relative Policy Optimization without extra hyperparameters or inference cost. Experiments on multiple reasoning benchmarks show that CARE improves Pass@1 by up to 4% while reducing reasoning length by 37%, achieving higher token efficiency.
By Zhengdong He, Yunfan Zhou, Jianguo Yao, Haibing Guan, Xijun Li
arXiv:2511. 05722v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-5 and Gemini 3 have pushed the frontier of automated reasoning and code generation.
By Zheng Du, Hao Kang, Song Han, Tushar Krishna, Ligeng Zhu
arXiv:2510. 22228v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Layer pruning has emerged as a widely adopted technique for improving the efficiency of large language models (LLMs).
By Keyu Wang, Tian Lyu, Guinan Su, Lu Yin, Marco Canini, Jonas Geiping, Shiwei Liu
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...
By Richmond Sin Jing Xuan, Rishabh Bhardwaj, Soujanya Poria
arXiv:2509. 04027v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Test-time scaling, primarily manifested through multi-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning via Reinforcement Learning (RL), has emerged as a pivotal paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs).
By Zeyu Gan, Hao Yi, Yong Liu
arXiv:2607. 11089v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting.
By Mohammed Ehab, Aymane El Gadarri, Vivek F. Farias, Adam Jozefiak, Ciamac C. Moallemi
arXiv:2505. 17315v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent language models exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, yet the influence of long-context capacity on reasoning remains underexplored.
By Wang Yang, Zirui Liu, Hongye Jin, Qingyu Yin, Vipin Chaudhary, Xiaotian Han
arXiv:2602. 08324v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning successfully enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it incurs substantial computational overhead for inference.
By Yuntian Tang, Bohan Jia, Wenxuan Huang, Lianyue Zhang, Jiao Xie, Wenxi Li, Wei Li, Jie Hu, Xinghao Chen Rongrong Ji, Shaohui Lin
The study investigates the performance gap between native-language reasoning and English-pivoted reasoning in large language models. By creating extensive multilingual reasoning datasets and fine‑tuning specialists on Qwen/Qwen3-8B-Base, the authors find that the native reasoning gap is much smaller (1.9–3.5%) than previously reported. They analyze weight‑space changes, discover a language‑agnostic reasoning core in the middle layers, and propose a Layer Swap technique that transfers these mid‑layer updates from an English specialist to native specialists, effectively closing most of the gap while maintaining native chain‑of‑thought output.
By Maxence Lasbordes, Am\'elie Chatelain, Djam\'e Seddah
arXiv:2508. 02178v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) often exhibit overthinking, producing verbose Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces that increase inference cost and obscure the underlying reasoning process.
By Taihang Zhen, Jialiang Hong, Kai Chen, Guang Yang, Junlan Feng, Wenpeng Zhu, Jing Huo, Yang Gao, Depeng Wang, Haitao Wan, Xi Yang, Fanyu Meng, Yuyao Zhang, Ji Qi, Xiangyu Zhou