InftyThink: Breaking the Length Limits of Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yan, Yuchen, Shen, Yongliang, Liu, Yang, Jiang, Jin, Zhang, Mengdi, Shao, Jian, Zhuang, Yueting
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912924586475520
author Yan, Yuchen
Shen, Yongliang
Liu, Yang
Jiang, Jin
Zhang, Mengdi
Shao, Jian
Zhuang, Yueting
author_facet Yan, Yuchen
Shen, Yongliang
Liu, Yang
Jiang, Jin
Zhang, Mengdi
Shao, Jian
Zhuang, Yueting
contents Advanced reasoning in large language models has achieved remarkable performance on challenging tasks, but the prevailing long-context reasoning paradigm faces critical limitations: quadratic computational scaling with sequence length, reasoning constrained by maximum context boundaries, and performance degradation beyond pre-training context windows. Existing approaches primarily compress reasoning chains without addressing the fundamental scaling problem. To overcome these challenges, we introduce InftyThink, a paradigm that transforms monolithic reasoning into an iterative process with intermediate summarization. By interleaving short reasoning segments with concise progress summaries, our approach enables unbounded reasoning depth while maintaining bounded computational costs. This creates a characteristic sawtooth memory pattern that significantly reduces computational complexity compared to traditional approaches. Furthermore, we develop a methodology for reconstructing long-context reasoning datasets into our iterative format, transforming OpenR1-Math into 333K training instances. Experiments across multiple model architectures demonstrate that our approach reduces computational costs while improving performance, with Qwen2.5-Math-7B showing 3-11% improvements across MATH500, AIME24, and GPQA_diamond benchmarks. Our work challenges the assumed trade-off between reasoning depth and computational efficiency, providing a more scalable approach to complex reasoning without architectural modifications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_06692
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle InftyThink: Breaking the Length Limits of Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models
Yan, Yuchen
Shen, Yongliang
Liu, Yang
Jiang, Jin
Zhang, Mengdi
Shao, Jian
Zhuang, Yueting
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Advanced reasoning in large language models has achieved remarkable performance on challenging tasks, but the prevailing long-context reasoning paradigm faces critical limitations: quadratic computational scaling with sequence length, reasoning constrained by maximum context boundaries, and performance degradation beyond pre-training context windows. Existing approaches primarily compress reasoning chains without addressing the fundamental scaling problem. To overcome these challenges, we introduce InftyThink, a paradigm that transforms monolithic reasoning into an iterative process with intermediate summarization. By interleaving short reasoning segments with concise progress summaries, our approach enables unbounded reasoning depth while maintaining bounded computational costs. This creates a characteristic sawtooth memory pattern that significantly reduces computational complexity compared to traditional approaches. Furthermore, we develop a methodology for reconstructing long-context reasoning datasets into our iterative format, transforming OpenR1-Math into 333K training instances. Experiments across multiple model architectures demonstrate that our approach reduces computational costs while improving performance, with Qwen2.5-Math-7B showing 3-11% improvements across MATH500, AIME24, and GPQA_diamond benchmarks. Our work challenges the assumed trade-off between reasoning depth and computational efficiency, providing a more scalable approach to complex reasoning without architectural modifications.
title InftyThink: Breaking the Length Limits of Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06692