arXiv AI

Second Thought: Reasoning in Parallel as LLM Agents Act and Observe

arXiv:2608. 13667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents in the ReAct paradigm alternate between reasoning, acting, and observing, but deliberate reasoning is confined to the Thought phase: while the agent serializes an action and waits for the environment, its reasoning is frozen.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 1

Fork-Think with Confidence

arXiv:2606. 31484v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parallel thinking has enjoyed great success for boosting LLM performance on reasoning tasks without the need for any re-training.

By Zena Al-Khalili, Rafi Hakim, Dietrich Klakow, Ji-Ung Lee
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Parason: Revealing Subtask and Trial Parallelism in LLM Reasoning

Parason is a new framework that discovers and exploits both subtask and trial parallelism in large language model (LLM) reasoning. By converting sequential reasoning traces into structured parallel trajectories and training with Parallelism-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization, it balances accuracy, latency, and parallelism. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks such as AIME24 and AIME25 show that Parason achieves an average acceleration of about 1.7× while maintaining competitive accuracy.

By Zhengyang Zhang, Zijian Zhang, Jiaxuan Gao, Shusheng Xu, Yi Wu, Song Han, Ligeng Zhu
arXiv AI
Sep 4

</think> Doesn't Stop Reasoning: Analysis of Spurious CoT Termination

The paper investigates a training‑free early‑exit technique that inserts an end‑of‑think (EoT) token to terminate chain‑of‑thought (CoT) reasoning in large reasoning models. It finds that the injected EoT often fails to cleanly switch the model from reasoning to answering, leading to continued reasoning‑like generation—termed spurious CoT termination—whose length scales with the amount of reasoning saved. By increasing attention to the EoT token through Exit‑token Attention Biasing (EAB), the authors reduce spurious termination and shorten the answering phase across multiple models and benchmarks.

By Seunghee Koh, Sungjae Choi, Minchan Kwon, Sunghyun Baek, Junmo Kim
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Latent Recurrent Thoughts: Recurrent Refinement of Proposed Latents for Reasoning with Frozen LLMs

Latent Recurrent Thoughts (LRT) proposes a method for reasoning with frozen large language models by operating in the model’s continuous representation space. A small auxiliary network generates initial latent vectors, which a tiny recurrent reasoner refines over multiple steps, decoupling computational depth from model size. Experiments on symbolic and natural‑language reasoning tasks show that LRT outperforms prior frozen‑decoder continuous‑space methods and chain‑of‑thought prompting while using far less inference compute.

By Zhaoliang Chen, Jie Fu
arXiv AI
Sep 3

When Can Large Reasoning Models Save Thinking? Mechanistic Analysis of Behavioral Divergence in Reasoning

The paper investigates why large reasoning models (LRMs) often continue to think even when prompted to stop, a phenomenon called "Still-thinking". By examining confidence at the thinking-termination boundary, internal attention divergences, and attention allocation across prompt segments, the authors find that high perplexity and greater attention to the original question correlate with continued thinking. They propose an attention‑intervention method that suppresses explicit reasoning, which reduces inefficiency but also lowers accuracy, underscoring a trade‑off between instruction compliance, inference speed, and correctness.

By Rongzhi Zhu, Yi Liu, Jiancheng Wang, Xiangyu Liu, Zequn Sun, Yiwei Wang, Yu Deng, Zijian Zhou, Wei Hu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 2

Message Passing Enables Efficient Reasoning

arXiv:2607. 01077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While inference-time scaling has improved the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), the need to generate long chains-of-thought (CoTs) is a computational bottleneck.

By Xuecheng Liu, Daman Arora, Gokul Swamy, Andrea Zanette