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Related papers: Reasoning Models Can Be Effective Without Thinking

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Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven to be an effective post-training strategy for enhancing reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs). Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a recent prominent method that encourages models to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Jiaqi Wang , Kevin Qinghong Lin , James Cheng , Mike Zheng Shou

Long chain-of-thought~(CoT) has become a dominant paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capability of large reasoning models~(LRMs); however, the performance gains often come with a substantial increase in reasoning budget. Recent studies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jie Cao , Tianwei Lin , Zhenxuan Fan , Bo Yuan , Ziyuan Zhao , Rolan Yan , Wenqiao Zhang , Siliang Tang

This is the second in a series of short reports that seek to help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working with AI through rigorous testing. In this report, we investigate Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Lennart Meincke , Ethan Mollick , Lilach Mollick , Dan Shapiro

When not using reasoning, repeating the input prompt improves performance for popular models (Gemini, GPT, Claude, and Deepseek) without increasing the number of generated tokens or latency.

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Yaniv Leviathan , Matan Kalman , Yossi Matias

Thinking Tokens (TT) have been proposed as an unsupervised method to facilitate reasoning in language models. However, despite their conceptual appeal, our findings show that TTs marginally improves performance and consistently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Sreeram Vennam , David Valente , David Herel , Ponnurangam Kumaraguru

Recent work shows that, beyond discrete reasoning through explicit chain-of-thought steps, which are limited by the boundaries of natural languages, large language models (LLMs) can also reason continuously in latent space, allowing richer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Dachuan Shi , Abedelkadir Asi , Keying Li , Xiangchi Yuan , Leyan Pan , Wenke Lee , Wen Xiao

Reasoning is critical for large language models (LLMs) to excel in a wide range of tasks. While methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and enhance LLM performance by decomposing problems into intermediate steps, they also incur…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Tingxu Han , Zhenting Wang , Chunrong Fang , Shiyu Zhao , Shiqing Ma , Zhenyu Chen

Reasoning Large Language Models (RLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on complex tasks, largely due to the adoption of Long Chain-of-Thought (Long CoT) reasoning. However, they often exhibit overthinking -- performing unnecessary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Keqin Peng , Liang Ding , Yuanxin Ouyang , Meng Fang , Dacheng Tao

Test-time scaling via explicit reasoning trajectories significantly boosts large language model (LLM) performance but often triggers overthinking. To explore this, we analyze reasoning through two lenses: Reasoning Length Dynamics, which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Zihao Wei , Liang Pang , Jiahao Liu , Wenjie Shi , Jingcheng Deng , Shicheng Xu , Zenghao Duan , Fei Sun , Huawei Shen , Xueqi Cheng

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable performance on complex tasks by engaging in extended reasoning before producing final answers, yet this strength introduces the risk of overthinking, where excessive token generation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Shu Yang , Junchao Wu , Xuansheng Wu , Derek Wong , Ninhao Liu , Di Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable problem-solving and basic mathematics abilities. However, their efficacy is highly contingent on the formulation of the prompt. This study endeavors to quantify the influence of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Rick Battle , Teja Gollapudi

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) generate explicit reasoning traces alongside final answers, yet the extent to which these traces influence answer generation remains unclear. In this work, we conduct a three-stage investigation into the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jue Zhang , Qingwei Lin , Saravan Rajmohan , Dongmei Zhang

Human cognition operates through two complementary modes: fast intuitive thinking and slow deliberate thinking. Vanilla large language models (LLMs) predominantly follow the fast-thinking paradigm, producing immediate responses; while…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Shengjia Zhang , Junjie Wu , Jiawei Chen , Changwang Zhang , Zhe Li , Xingyu Lou , Wangchunshu Zhou , Sheng Zhou , Can Wang , Jun Wang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been proven effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Recent advancements, such as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek-R1, suggest that scaling up the length of CoT sequences during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Heming Xia , Chak Tou Leong , Wenjie Wang , Yongqi Li , Wenjie Li

LLMs are typically trained to answer user questions or follow instructions similarly to how human experts respond. However, in the standard alignment framework they lack the basic ability of explicit thinking before answering. Thinking is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Tianhao Wu , Janice Lan , Weizhe Yuan , Jiantao Jiao , Jason Weston , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar

We propose cognitive prompting as a novel approach to guide problem-solving in large language models (LLMs) through structured, human-like cognitive operations, such as goal clarification, decomposition, filtering, abstraction, and pattern…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Oliver Kramer , Jill Baumann

Large language models often solve complex reasoning tasks more effectively with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), but at the cost of long, low-bandwidth token sequences. Humans, by contrast, often reason softly by maintaining a distribution over…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Yao Tang , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Qingxiu Dong , Furu Wei , Jiatao Gu

Compute scaling for language model (LM) pretraining has outpaced the growth of human-written texts, leading to concerns that data will become the bottleneck to LM scaling. To continue scaling pretraining in this data-constrained regime, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yangjun Ruan , Neil Band , Chris J. Maddison , Tatsunori Hashimoto

Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized across a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks due to their impressive capabilities as few-shot learners. Recent techniques, such as chain-of-thought (CoT)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Kamesh R

As reasoning LLMs increasingly trade tokens for accuracy through deliberation, search, and self-correction, a single accuracy score can no longer tell whether those tokens buy useful reasoning, recovery from hard instances, or unnecessary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Daniel Kaiser , Arnoldo Frigessi , Ali Ramezani-Kebrya , Benjamin Ricaud