The paper investigates how explicit reasoning in language models can lead to a "reasoning‑trace overflow," where the model spends most of its 32k‑token output budget on reasoning rather than producing code. Across seven models and six code benchmarks, overflow is rare on simple tasks but common on harder benchmarks, often due to repetitive reasoning loops. The study shows that disabling reasoning can sometimes be competitive, while prompt steering and budgeted transitions can mitigate overflow and improve token efficiency.
arXiv:2509.14093v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can substantially improve the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), but it often comes with hig...
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.
arXiv:2606. 02835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve performance by generating explicit intermediate reasoning traces through increased test-time compute, yet the assumption that longer reasoning is consistently beneficial remains under-examined.
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.
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.
arXiv:2506. 13932v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rise of large language models (LLMs) has led to dramatic improvements across a wide range of natural language tasks.
arXiv:2604. 04930v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large reasoning models rely on long chain-of-thought generation to solve complex problems, but extended reasoning often incurs substantial computational cost and can even degrade performance due to overthinking.
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.
arXiv:2608.20359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are deployed for increasingly complex tasks involving planning and multi-step decision making, but high-quality performanc...
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...
arXiv:2607. 18100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extended reasoning has become standard for frontier Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the trajectories these models produce remain largely uncontrollable.
arXiv:2606. 15589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For tool-augmented language models, comparing natural-language reasoning with code-execution pipelines is difficult because the comparison changes both the intermediate representation and the execution mechanism.