The paper revisits the impact of pruning on large language models (LLMs) during test-time scaling (TTS). While prior work found that structured pruning degrades reasoning performance, this study shows that unstructured pruning—removing only specific redundant weights—can actually improve TTS performance on reasoning benchmarks for models s1.1-7B and Qwen3-8B, sometimes surpassing the full-weight models. The authors also examine how different layer-wise sparsity allocation strategies affect these outcomes.
By Ocean Monjur, Shahriar Kabir Nahin, Anshuman Chhabra
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 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: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:2502. 15631v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models have demonstrated remarkable progress in mathematical reasoning, leveraging chain-of-thought and reinforcement learning.
By Marthe Ballon, Andres Algaba, Vincent Ginis
arXiv:2605.13165v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Long chain-of-thought (Long CoT) reasoning improves performance on multi-step problems, but it also induces overthinking. This inefficiency is espe...
By Chenjun Xu, Zhennan Zhou, Zhan Su, Bill Howe, Lucy Lu Wang, Bingbing Wen
arXiv:2504.04342v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Scaling up model parameters and training data consistently improves the performance of large language models (LLMs), but at the cost of rapidly gro...
By Ayan Sengupta, Siddhant Chaudhary, Tanmoy Chakraborty
OBC‑Prune introduces an outcome‑based calibration approach for pruning large reasoning models, focusing on the causal importance of each reasoning sentence rather than uniform activation salience. By pairing correct and incorrect rollouts and using intervention‑based analysis, it assigns per‑token weights that guide one‑shot pruning methods such as SparseGPT, Wanda, and ALPS. Experiments on DeepSeek‑R1‑Distill‑Qwen models show consistent accuracy gains and shorter reasoning traces across multiple benchmarks at 40‑50% sparsity.
By Ha Lan Nguyen, Huy Hoang Tran, Trac-Duy Tran, Dung D. Le
arXiv:2510. 13940v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has focused on test-time scaling to improve reasoning via increased inference computation, but often at the cost of efficiency.
By Zhen Yang, Mingyang Zhang, Feng Chen, Ganggui Ding, Liang Hou, Xin Tao, Ying-Cong Chen
arXiv:2602. 01997v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that layer pruning can effectively compress large language models (LLMs) while retaining strong performance on classification benchmarks, often with little or no finetuning.
By Safal Shrestha, Anubhav Shrestha, Minwu Kim, Aadim Nepal, Keith Ross
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, these models often exhibit "computational overthinking," generating redundant reasoning steps that increase latency and cost without improving accuracy.
arXiv:2609.39334v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Test-time scaling has recently emerged as a powerful approach for improving LLM reasoning by allocating additional computation during inference, subs...
By Jinwoo Jeong (Korea University), Woohyung Choi (Korea University), Myeongjae Jeon (POSTECH), Jeongseob Ahn (Korea University)