arXiv Computation and Language

Keeping Time vs. Understanding Time: Neither Alone Explains Temporal Reasoning in LLMs

arXiv AI
Aug 28

The Reasoning Tax: Token Economics of LLM Reasoning Across Task Types and Deployment Contexts

The paper introduces the Token Economy Score (TES), a metric that quantifies the accuracy gain of reasoning-capable large language models relative to non-reasoning baselines, normalized by token generation cost. An empirical study across 151 runs on seven diverse benchmarks shows that task structure—such as sequential inference chains—predicts higher TES, while knowledge-recall tasks yield lower TES despite difficulty. The analysis also reveals diminishing returns at higher reasoning effort and highlights how deployment context, via Reasoning Cost Share and Deployment Cost Multiplier, can alter the economic viability of reasoning workloads.

By Sachin Gopal Wani, Ajay Dholakia, David Ellison
arXiv AI
Aug 13

AI4AI at Test-Time: Strong-to-Weak Capability Transfer via Harnesses

arXiv:2608. 12307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work on distillation transfers the capabilities of large models to smaller ones often by updating the latter's parameters, through teacher forcing, on-policy distillation, and related training-time methods.

By Cheng Qian, Wenting Zhao, Liangwei Yang, Heng Wang, Jielin Qiu, Heng Ji, Silvio Savarese, Huan Wang, Shelby Heinecke
arXiv AI
2d ago

Routes of Reasoning: Reading and Reshaping Test-Time Compute in MoE Models

The paper introduces a method to control reasoning behaviors in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models by labeling sentence-level segments with six distinct reasoning behaviors (planning, execution, restatement, fact, reflection, and conclusion). Linear probes on MoE router logits can predict these behaviors nearly as accurately as probes on the full hidden state, enabling the authors to edit router scores during inference to reduce overthinking. This intervention cuts generated tokens by a median of 30.4% (up to 63.3%) across multiple models and benchmarks without significant loss in accuracy, and often improves it.

By Shengjie Wang, Mohsen Fayyaz, Nanyun Peng
arXiv AI
Sep 15

TimeThink: Eliciting Compositional Reasoning in Timeseries Large Language Models

arXiv:2609.13457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Timeseries multimodal large language models (TS-MLLMs) have recently begun leveraging the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for qu...

By Sudarshan Regmi, Arvind Pillai, Yu Yvonne Wu, Yuliang Chen, Bibek Panthi, Tess Z. Griffin, Michael V. Heinz, Lisa Marsch, Nicholas C. Jacobson, Andrew Campbell
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Recursive Agentic Reasoning

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.

By Shengxin Zhang, Xiaomin Wu, Xiyang Wu, Jing Xie