arXiv AI
Oct 21

PORA: Learning When More Reasoning Pays Off for LLM Agents

The paper introduces PORA, a method that teaches large language model agents to decide when to allocate more reasoning steps versus fewer, based on the expected downstream benefit. PORA trains by running each state twice—once with short reasoning and once with long reasoning—and learns to predict the value of extended reasoning. During inference, a controller uses this prediction and remaining budget information to choose the appropriate reasoning length without running both options, improving performance across diverse tasks.

By Bo Yan, Qi Zhang, Zhen Tan, Tianlong Chen, Song Wang