The paper introduces Budget‑Efficient Thinking (BET), a two‑stage framework that treats adaptive reasoning as a computational investment, aligning solve‑or‑fold decisions with expected return rather than perceived difficulty. BET learns three distinct behaviors: concise short solves for easy queries, early abstention (nice fold) when further reasoning is unlikely to pay off, and allocating sufficient compute (hero call) for hard‑but‑solvable questions. Experiments on seven benchmarks with three base models show BET cuts reasoning tokens by 54% while boosting accuracy by up to 3.2%, and it transfers effectively to scientific QA and logical reasoning tasks.
By Zhaomeng Zhou, Lan Zhang, Junyang Wang, Mu Yuan, Songlin Liu, Tingzhao Li, Yiqing Hu, Yumeng Zhao
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.
By Gijs Kassenaar, Zhao Yang, Vincent Fran\c{c}ois-Lavet
The paper introduces agentic meta‑reasoning, a structured inference‑time framework that explicitly manages control decisions—such as selecting partial work, restarting, or stopping—during long‑horizon agentic tasks. By delegating task execution to workers and consolidating decisions through a lightweight controller that references persistent memory, the method reduces the need to replay full histories. Experiments on ProgramBench and other benchmarks show that meta‑reasoning improves performance over direct control baselines, especially as computation budgets increase, and reveals greater reuse of earlier work and higher solution coverage.
By Paras Dahal, Anton Bakhtin, Taco Cohen, Zhengxing Chen, Carole-Jean Wu, Rob Fergus, Scott Yih, Gabriel Synnaeve, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Sanjeev Arora, Jason Weston, Anirudh Goyal
The paper argues that large language models need adaptive reasoning rather than fixed reasoning budgets. It shows that over‑reasoning leads to high computational cost without accuracy gains, while under‑reasoning results in incorrect or incomplete solutions. The authors evaluate these failure modes on MATH‑500 and the GAIA benchmark, highlighting the need for dynamic reasoning allocation in agentic AI systems.
By Md Jueal Mia, M. Hadi Amini
arXiv:2604. 05164v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As LLM reasoning performance plateaus, improving inference-time compute efficiency is crucial to mitigate overthinking and long thinking traces even for simple queries.
By Neharika Jali, Anupam Nayak, Gauri Joshi
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:2609.16055v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Test-time compute has emerged as a major approach to improving the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing test-time reasonin...
By Zhiren Gong, Yikun Hou, Zihao Zeng, Ming Xiao, Chau Yuen, Wei Yang Bryan Lim
arXiv:2609.37304v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large reasoning models improve performance on challenging problems by allocating additional computation before answering, but longer reasoning does not...
By Zhibin Wen, Tao Han, Lei Bai, Can Li, Yang Xu
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:2606. 03965v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models improve final-answer accuracy through extended chain-of-thought reasoning, but often spend tokens inefficiently and offer little inference-time control.
By Yu Xia, Zhouhang Xie, Xin Xu, Byungkyu Kang, Prarit Lamba, Xiang Gao, Julian McAuley
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.
By Agamdeep Singh, Srishti Gautam, Priyanshu Gupta, Nikita Mehrotra, Tanmay Bakshi, Sumit Gulwani
arXiv:2603.00578v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Long chain-of-thought~(CoT) reasoning improves the problem-solving capability of large reasoning models~(LRMs), but often incurs substantial...
By Jie Cao, Tianwei Lin, Juekai Lin, Zhenxuan Fan, Yunqi Cao, Bo Yuan, Ziyuan Zhao, Rolan Yan, Wenqiao Zhang, Siliang Tang