arXiv AI

ROM: Real-time Overthinking Mitigation via Streaming Detection and Intervention

arXiv:2603. 22016v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often reach a correct solution before their long Chain-of-Thought trace ends, yet continue with redundant verification, repeated attempts, or unnecessary exploration that wastes computation and can even overturn the correct answer.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

TRACES: Tagging Reasoning Steps for Adaptive Cost-Efficient Early-Stopping

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.

By Yannis Belkhiter, Seshu Tirupathi, Giulio Zizzo, John D. Kelleher
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 17

You Only Pass Once: Answering and Abstaining Together in a Single Forward Pass of a Frozen Language Model

arXiv:2608. 14465v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A frozen language model on reasoning tasks has two coupled weaknesses: it under-uses evidence its own residual stream already encodes, and it fails to detect when the input is insufficient to answer, so it confabulates.

By Ziyang Luo, Zhongyao Chu, Xinjie He, Youting Wang, Xukui Qin, Runxiong Wu, Yan-Syuan Chen
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Training-Free Inference-Time Self-Reflection and Cost-Bounded Early Stopping for Large Language Models

The paper introduces EvoResearcher, a training‑free, inference‑time protocol that enables a frozen large language model to perform cost‑bounded self‑reflection and early stopping. By iterating through generate → self‑critique → revise steps until a maximum depth or a CONFIRMED sentinel is reached, the model can self‑verify its answers within a strict compute budget. The protocol incorporates four self‑reflective meta‑reward components—correctness, efficiency, reflection depth, and tool‑call diversity—implemented as prompt‑level mechanisms, and is validated on Big‑Bench Hard, GSM8K, and MATH benchmarks, achieving comparable accuracy while terminating 82‑88% of items early with only about 2.1 generations per question.

By Wei Yu, Suxing Liu, Minjie Yu, Jiahao Wang, Zhijian Zheng, Haocheng Deng, Bing Li
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Flow Reasoning Models: Turning Flows Into Efficient Recurrent Reasoners

Flow Reasoning Models (FRMs) are a new framework that turns continuous flow models into efficient recurrent reasoners for structured tasks. By self‑conditioning a flow model on its own past outputs, FRMs iteratively refine solutions, allowing parallel decision making and revision. The authors introduce Fixed‑Point Forcing (FPF) to mitigate exposure bias at deeper recursion, and report near‑perfect solve rates on Sudoku‑Extreme, Zebra, and Maze‑Unique, outperforming existing masked‑diffusion and specialized baselines while using far fewer inference FLOPs.

By Alec Helbling, Andrey Bryutkin, Mauro Martino, Duen Horng Chau, Nima Dehmamy, Hendrik Strobelt