arXiv AI By Lukas Twist, Helen Yannakoudakis, Jie M. Zhang

Reasoning-Trace Overflow in Code Generation: An Empirical Study of Explicit Reasoning Models

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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.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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