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Related papers: Less is More: Improving LLM Reasoning with Minimal…

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Test-time scaling has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex reasoning, yet the limitations of current Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation obscures whether performance gains stem from genuine reasoning or mere verbosity. To…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zhizhang Fu , Yuancheng Gu , Chenkai Hu , Hanmeng Liu , Yue Zhang

Entropy minimization (EM) trains the model to concentrate even more probability mass on its most confident outputs. We show that this simple objective alone, without any labeled data, can substantially improve large language models' (LLMs)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Shivam Agarwal , Zimin Zhang , Lifan Yuan , Jiawei Han , Hao Peng

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance by producing long chains of thought, but their inference costs are high and often generate redundant reasoning. Small language models (SLMs) are far more efficient, yet struggle on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Haojin Wang , Yike Wang , Shangbin Feng , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Yulia Tsvetkov

Training models to effectively use test-time compute is crucial for improving the reasoning performance of LLMs. Current methods mostly do so via fine-tuning on search traces or running RL with 0/1 outcome reward, but do these approaches…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has enabled large language models (LLMs) to utilize additional computation through intermediate tokens to solve complex tasks. However, we posit that typical reasoning traces contain many redundant tokens,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Tergel Munkhbat , Namgyu Ho , Seo Hyun Kim , Yongjin Yang , Yujin Kim , Se-Young Yun

Recent reasoning LLMs (RLMs), especially those trained with verifier-based reinforcement learning, often perform worse with few-shot CoT than with direct answering. We revisit this paradox using high-quality reasoning traces from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Haonan Wang , Weida Liang , Zihang Fu , Nie Zheng , Yifan Zhang , Yao Tong , Tongyao Zhu , Hao Jiang , Chuang Li , Jiaying Wu , Kenji Kawaguchi

Advanced large language models (LLMs) frequently reflect in reasoning chain-of-thoughts (CoTs), where they self-verify the correctness of current solutions and explore alternatives. However, given recent findings that LLMs detect limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Zhongwei Yu , Wannian Xia , Xue Yan , Bo Xu , Haifeng Zhang , Yali Du , Jun Wang

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable emergent capabilities through extensive pre-training, they still face critical limitations in generalizing to specialized domains and handling diverse linguistic variations, known…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Jinwu Hu , Zhitian Zhang , Guohao Chen , Xutao Wen , Chao Shuai , Wei Luo , Bin Xiao , Yuanqing Li , Mingkui Tan

Test-time scaling methods have seen a rapid increase in popularity for its computational efficiency and parameter-independent training to improve reasoning performance on Large Language Models. One such method is called budget forcing, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Ravindra Aribowo Tarunokusumo , Rafael Fernandes Cunha

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate exceptional capability in tackling complex mathematical, logical, and coding tasks by leveraging extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Test-time scaling methods, such as prolonging CoT with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Weizhe Lin , Xing Li , Zhiyuan Yang , Xiaojin Fu , Hui-Ling Zhen , Yaoyuan Wang , Xianzhi Yu , Wulong Liu , Xiaosong Li , Mingxuan Yuan

Test-Time Scaling (TTS) has proven effective in improving the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference. However, existing research has overlooked the efficiency of TTS from a latency-sensitive perspective. Through a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Zili Wang , Tianyu Zhang , Haoli Bai , Lu Hou , Xianzhi Yu , Wulong Liu , Shiming Xiang , Lei Zhu

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities when provided with chain-of-thought exemplars, but curating large reasoning datasets remains laborious and resource-intensive. In this work, we introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Sondos Mahmoud Bsharat , Zhiqiang Shen

Recent studies have shown that making a model spend more time thinking through longer Chain of Thoughts (CoTs) enables it to gain significant improvements in complex reasoning tasks. While current researches continue to explore the benefits…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Wenkai Yang , Shuming Ma , Yankai Lin , Furu Wei

Large Language Models (LLMs) often rely on long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex tasks. While effective, these trajectories are frequently inefficient, leading to high latency from excessive token generation, or unstable…

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly progressed into general-purpose agents capable of solving a broad spectrum of tasks. However, current models remain inefficient at reasoning: they apply fixed inference-time compute regardless of…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements in reasoning capabilities, performing well on various challenging benchmarks. Techniques like Chain-of-Thought prompting have been introduced to further improve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Zehui Ling , Deshu Chen , Hongwei Zhang , Yifeng Jiao , Xin Guo , Yuan Cheng

Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning, yet their efficiency is limited by the surging cognitive overhead of long thought traces. In this paper, we propose LightThinker, a method that enables LLMs to dynamically compress…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yuqi Zhu , Jintian Zhang , Zhenjie Wan , Yujie Luo , Shuofei Qiao , Zhengke Gui , Da Zheng , Lei Liang , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

Scaling large language models (LLMs) has driven significant advancements, yet it faces diminishing returns and escalating energy demands. This work explores how test-time compute (TTC) can serve as an energy-efficient complement to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Yunho Jin , Gu-Yeon Wei , David Brooks

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities by scaling test-time compute via long Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, recent findings suggest that raw token counts are unreliable proxies for reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Wei-Lin Chen , Liqian Peng , Tian Tan , Chao Zhao , Blake JianHang Chen , Ziqian Lin , Alec Go , Yu Meng

Scaling test-time compute through extended chains of thought has become a dominant paradigm for improving large language model reasoning. However, existing research implicitly assumes that longer thinking always yields better results. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Shu Zhou , Rui Ling , Junan Chen , Xin Wang , Tao Fan , Hao Wang