arXiv Machine Learning

RATIO: Reasoning Analysis and Token-level Inference Optimization for Quantized Reasoning Models

The paper introduces RATIO, a framework for improving quantized reasoning models by identifying overthinking tokens and applying token-specific penalties. It uses Quantization-aware Reasoning Behavior Analysis to detect problematic tokens and Token-Specific Penalty Determination to assign penalties without extra training. Experiments show RATIO outperforms existing methods, boosting accuracy by up to 9.8 points and shortening chain-of-thought length by up to 51.3%.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Quantization Inflates Reasoning: Token Inflation as a Hidden Cost of Low-Bit Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606. 25519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantization is widely used to reduce the inference cost of large language models, but its effect on reasoning models is not fully captured by final-answer accuracy or per-token latency.

By Xinyu Lian, Walid Krichene, Beichen Huang, Masahiro Tanaka, Olatunji Ruwase, Li Zhang, Minjia Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 15

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

Towards Efficient Large Language Reasoning Models via Extreme-Ratio Chain-of-Thought Compression

arXiv:2602. 08324v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning successfully enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it incurs substantial computational overhead for inference.

By Yuntian Tang, Bohan Jia, Wenxuan Huang, Lianyue Zhang, Jiao Xie, Wenxi Li, Wei Li, Jie Hu, Xinghao Chen Rongrong Ji, Shaohui Lin
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Towards Efficient Reasoning: Learning Causal Shortcuts for Diffusion Language Models

The paper introduces Causal Shortcut Learning (CSL), a framework that identifies token chains—called causal shortcuts—that guide Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) toward correct reasoning paths. By extracting these shortcuts and applying parallel prioritized masking during training, CSL improves both convergence speed and generation accuracy. Experiments on several reasoning benchmarks and two base models show CSL outperforms existing SFT-variant baselines, achieving an average 1.92% improvement over SFT-only models and up to 4.20% on MATH-500.

By Dian Jin, Kairong Han, Baohong Li, Xinpeng Dong, Zijing Hu, Nuanqiao Shan, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
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
arXiv AI
4d ago

Probability is Not Enough: Exploring and Counting Divergent Tokens for Reasoning Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs

The paper introduces Divergent Token Confidence (DTC), a method that estimates large language model confidence by counting tokens where two models strongly disagree during decoding. DTC uses Jensen-Shannon divergence between next-token distributions along the same reasoning trajectory and shows a near-negative correlation with answer accuracy. Experiments on multiple model families and six mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that DTC improves calibration over traditional probability-based and verbalized baselines, achieving lower expected calibration errors in both white-box and black-box settings.

By Feiyang Li, Shengjing Liu, Qi Zhan, Sijie Cheng, Weiqing Wang, Hongwen Chen, Yuxuan Yang, Wen Wang, Yile Wang, Hui Huang