The paper introduces Budget‑Efficient Thinking (BET), a two‑stage framework that treats adaptive reasoning as a computational investment, aligning solve‑or‑fold decisions with expected return rather than perceived difficulty. BET learns three distinct behaviors: concise short solves for easy queries, early abstention (nice fold) when further reasoning is unlikely to pay off, and allocating sufficient compute (hero call) for hard‑but‑solvable questions. Experiments on seven benchmarks with three base models show BET cuts reasoning tokens by 54% while boosting accuracy by up to 3.2%, and it transfers effectively to scientific QA and logical reasoning tasks.
By Zhaomeng Zhou, Lan Zhang, Junyang Wang, Mu Yuan, Songlin Liu, Tingzhao Li, Yiqing Hu, Yumeng Zhao
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.
By Gijs Kassenaar, Zhao Yang, Vincent Fran\c{c}ois-Lavet
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.
By Paras Dahal, Anton Bakhtin, Taco Cohen, Zhengxing Chen, Carole-Jean Wu, Rob Fergus, Scott Yih, Gabriel Synnaeve, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Sanjeev Arora, Jason Weston, Anirudh Goyal
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.
By Md Jueal Mia, M. Hadi Amini
arXiv:2604. 05164v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As LLM reasoning performance plateaus, improving inference-time compute efficiency is crucial to mitigate overthinking and long thinking traces even for simple queries.
By Neharika Jali, Anupam Nayak, Gauri Joshi
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