When Reasoning Goes Astray: Attention Dynamics of Uncontrolled Reasoning
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The paper introduces RADAR, a method that models large reasoning models (LRMs) as four states and uses dynamic attention responses to detect uncontrolled reasoning in real time. RADAR identifies abnormal attention patterns that precede repetitive loops, and the authors demonstrate that realigning these patterns reduces looping while maintaining performance. The study offers a mechanistic explanation of how benign reasoning can degenerate into harmful behavior and provides actionable guidance for runtime interventions.
arXiv:2606. 02835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve performance by generating explicit intermediate reasoning traces through increased test-time compute, yet the assumption that longer reasoning is consistently beneficial remains under-examined.
The paper investigates why large reasoning models (LRMs) often continue to think even when prompted to stop, a phenomenon called "Still-thinking". By examining confidence at the thinking-termination boundary, internal attention divergences, and attention allocation across prompt segments, the authors find that high perplexity and greater attention to the original question correlate with continued thinking. They propose an attention‑intervention method that suppresses explicit reasoning, which reduces inefficiency but also lowers accuracy, underscoring a trade‑off between instruction compliance, inference speed, and correctness.
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.
arXiv:2509.24711v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current answering paradigms for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often fail to account for the fact that some questions may lie beyond the model's ope...
arXiv:2510. 11713v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world applications of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often require reasoning about changing prompts or environments.