arXiv AI By Zhengdong He, Yunfan Zhou, Jianguo Yao, Haibing Guan, Xijun Li

To Think or Not to Think: Allocating Reasoning Where It Helps

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The paper introduces CARE, a contrastive accuracy reward estimation method that adaptively adjusts reasoning length for large language models. By comparing beneficial length adjustments from online sampled responses, CARE applies adaptive length rewards within Group Relative Policy Optimization without extra hyperparameters or inference cost. Experiments on multiple reasoning benchmarks show that CARE improves Pass@1 by up to 4% while reducing reasoning length by 37%, achieving higher token efficiency.

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