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.
By Yannis Belkhiter, Seshu Tirupathi, Giulio Zizzo, John D. Kelleher
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: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.
By Parsa Hosseini, Sumit Nawathe, Mahdi Salmani, Meisam Razaviyayn, Soheil Feizi
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.
By Sheldon Yu, Tong Yu, Xunyi Jiang, Rohan Surana, Gagan Mundada, Sungchul Kim, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu
arXiv:2607. 11089v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting.
By Mohammed Ehab, Aymane El Gadarri, Vivek F. Farias, Adam Jozefiak, Ciamac C. Moallemi
arXiv:2606. 30852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning models spend different amounts of useful computation across instances, but it remains unclear when a learned stopping rule improves over simple confidence or convergence thresholds.
By Zhe Dong (University of Maine at Presque Isle), Fang Qin (Stanford University), Manish Shah (Independent Researcher)