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Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks, but their inference remains computationally inefficient. We observe a common failure mode in many prevalent LLMs, overthinking, where models generate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Junhong Lin , Xinyue Zeng , Jie Zhu , Song Wang , Julian Shun , Jun Wu , Dawei Zhou

Most efforts to improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) involve either scaling the number of parameters and the size of training data, or scaling inference computation by letting models generate complex chains of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yeskendir Koishekenov , Aldo Lipani , Nicola Cancedda

We investigate the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs), including reasoning-based and non-reasoning models, in performing zero-shot financial sentiment analysis. Using the Financial PhraseBank dataset annotated by domain experts,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Dimitris Vamvourellis , Dhagash Mehta

Reasoning with a chain-of-thought (CoT) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks but incurs significant inference costs due to the generation of long rationales. We propose Thinking States, a method that performs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ido Amos , Avi Caciularu , Mor Geva , Amir Globerson , Jonathan Herzig , Lior Shani , Idan Szpektor

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enhances reasoning in large language models (LLMs) but often leads to verbose and redundant outputs, thus increasing inference cost. We hypothesize that many reasoning steps are unnecessary for producing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xin Liu , Lu Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities on complex problems using long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, they often suffer from overthinking, meaning generating unnecessarily lengthy reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yi Bin , Tianyi Jiang , Yujuan Ding , Kainian Zhu , Fei Ma , Jingkuan Song , Yang Yang , Heng Tao Shen

One critical challenge for large language models (LLMs) for making complex reasoning is their reliance on matching reasoning patterns from training data, instead of proactively selecting the most appropriate cognitive strategy to solve a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Qin Liu , Wenxuan Zhou , Nan Xu , James Y. Huang , Fei Wang , Sheng Zhang , Hoifung Poon , Muhao Chen

We study the reasoning behavior of large language models (LLMs) under limited computation budgets. In such settings, producing useful partial solutions quickly is often more practical than exhaustive reasoning, which incurs high inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xuanming Zhang , Shwan Ashrafi , Aziza Mirsaidova , Amir H. Rezaeian , Miguel Ballesteros , Lydia B. Chilton , Zhou Yu , Dan Roth

Large Language Models (LLMs) are demonstrating rapid improvements on complex reasoning benchmarks, particularly when allowed to utilize intermediate reasoning steps before converging on a final solution. However, current literature often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Ákos Prucs , Márton Csutora , Mátyás Antal , Márk Marosi

The remarkable performance of the o1 model in complex reasoning demonstrates that test-time compute scaling can further unlock the model's potential, enabling powerful System-2 thinking. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Yixin Ji , Juntao Li , Yang Xiang , Hai Ye , Kaixin Wu , Kai Yao , Jia Xu , Linjian Mo , Min Zhang

Recently, Zaremba et al. demonstrated that increasing inference-time computation improves robustness in large proprietary reasoning LLMs. In this paper, we first show that smaller-scale, open-source models (e.g., DeepSeek R1, Qwen3,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Tong Wu , Chong Xiang , Jiachen T. Wang , Weichen Yu , Chawin Sitawarin , Vikash Sehwag , Prateek Mittal

Inference-time scaling can enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) on complex problems that benefit from step-by-step problem solving. Although lengthening generated scratchpads has proven effective for…

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…

Recent research has highlighted the importance of dataset size in scaling language models. However, large language models (LLMs) are notoriously token-hungry during pre-training, and high-quality text data on the web is approaching its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Fuzhao Xue , Yao Fu , Wangchunshu Zhou , Zangwei Zheng , Yang You

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances language models' performance but often leads to inefficient "overthinking" on simple problems. We identify that existing approaches directly penalizing reasoning length fail to account for varying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Junjie Yang , Ke Lin , Xing Yu

Associative memory has long underpinned the design of sequential models. Beyond recall, humans reason by projecting future states and selecting goal-directed actions, a capability that modern language models increasingly require but do not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Peihao Wang , Shan Yang , Xijun Wang , Tesi Xiao , Xin Liu , Changlong Yu , Yu Lou , Pan Li , Zhangyang Wang , Ming Lin , René Vidal

Test-time scaling offers a promising path to improve LLM reasoning by utilizing more compute at inference time; however, the true promise of this paradigm lies in extrapolation (i.e., improvement in performance on hard problems as LLMs keep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Amrith Setlur , Matthew Y. R. Yang , Charlie Snell , Jeremy Greer , Ian Wu , Virginia Smith , Max Simchowitz , Aviral Kumar

Thinking Large Language Models (LLMs) generate explicit intermediate reasoning traces before final answers, potentially improving transparency, interpretability, and solution accuracy for code generation. However, the quality of these…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Haoran Xue , Gias Uddin , Song Wang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by prompting intermediate steps, improving accuracy and robustness in arithmetic, logic, and commonsense tasks. However, this benefit comes with high computational…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Kerui Huang , Shuhan Liu , Xing Hu , Tongtong Xu , Lingfeng Bao , Xin Xia

Test-time compute scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing mathematical reasoning in large language models (LLMs) by allocating additional computational resources during inference. However, current methods employ uniform…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Yang Xiao , Chunpu Xu , Ruifeng Yuan , Jiashuo Wang , Wenjie Li , Pengfei Liu