arXiv AI

Learning When to Think: Adaptive Reasoning for Test-Time Compute Allocation

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

The Easy, the Hard, and the Learnable: Confidence and Difficulty-Adaptive Policy Optimization for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 07950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RL with verifiable rewards can substantially improve LLM reasoning, yet standard GRPO-style training often treats easy, hard, and learnable questions alike through uniform sampling and weighting, leading to inefficient compute allocation.

By Zhanke Zhou, Xiangyu Lu, Chentao Cao, Brando Miranda, Tongliang Liu, Bo Han, Sanmi Koyejo
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Fewer Tokens, Smaller Cache: Reward-Coordinated Efficient Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 04771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel on complex tasks through long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, but their lengthy intermediate steps cause severe overthinking that inflates inference cost.

By Qiyuan Zhu, Dezhi Li, Pengyu Cheng, Tianle Chen, Jiacheng Wang, Ruijie Shen, Hao Gu, Sida Lin, Zirui Liu, Jiacheng Liu, Sirui Han
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 Machine Learning
Aug 28

Understanding Evolution Strategies for LLM Reasoning: Broader Reasoning Coverage than GRPO

The paper investigates Evolution Strategies (ES) as a memory‑efficient post‑training method for large language model (LLM) reasoning. It demonstrates that ES outperforms Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) by achieving broader reasoning coverage, improving Pass@K metrics, and avoiding entropy collapse. The study also reveals that ES’s performance gains stem from sparse, high‑magnitude parameter updates, do not cause catastrophic forgetting, and can be combined with GRPO in a sequential training strategy.

By Yunpeng Ba, Zhi Zheng, Yue Xie, Jiaqing Li, Xialiang Tong, Tao Zhong, Mingxuan Yuan, Zhichao Lu, Xuyang Wu, Zhenkun Wang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 5

Fewer Tokens, Smaller Cache: Reward-Coordinated Efficient Reasoning

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel on complex tasks through long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, but their lengthy intermediate steps cause severe overthinking that inflates inference cost. KV-cache compression is a common solution, yet existing reasoning-oriented methods apply a uniform policy across the trajectory and judge compression only by what it removes from the cache.

arXiv AI
Sep 7

Extremely Sparse Supervision Incentivizes Reasoning Ability

The paper reports that in on‑policy distillation for large language models, reasoning performance can be improved by supervising only a tiny fraction of generated tokens—sometimes just one or two tokens per reasoning trajectory, about 0.05% of all tokens. This sparse supervision consistently matches or exceeds full‑token training across nine teacher‑student setups on mathematical reasoning, and is also validated on coding reasoning, Llama models, and PPO‑based reinforcement learning with verifiable reward. The findings suggest that effective post‑training does not require token‑intensive supervision and may align more closely with natural learning processes that focus on critical reasoning steps.

By Zhishuai Liu, Xingzi Xu, Mehmet Saygin Seyfioglu, Pan Xu, Karim Bouyarmane