THINK-Bench: Evaluating Thinking Efficiency and Chain-of-Thought Quality of Large Reasoning Models

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Autori principali: Li, Zhiyuan, Chang, Yi, Wu, Yuan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Li, Zhiyuan
Chang, Yi
Wu, Yuan
author_facet Li, Zhiyuan
Chang, Yi
Wu, Yuan
contents Large reasoning models (LRMs) have achieved impressive performance in complex tasks, often outperforming conventional large language models (LLMs). However, the prevalent issue of overthinking severely limits their computational efficiency. Overthinking occurs when models generate excessive and redundant tokens that contribute little to accurate outcomes, especially in simple tasks, resulting in a significant waste of computational resources. To systematically investigate this issue, we introduce Think-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning efficiency of LRMs. We also propose novel efficiency metrics and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of various LRMs across multiple dimensions, including the reasoning process, outcome quality, and chain-of-thought (CoT) characteristics. Our analysis reveals that most LRMs exhibit overthinking in handling easy questions, generating unnecessarily lengthy reasoning chains. While many LRMs demonstrate high CoT quality, several suffer from low efficiency. We hope that Think-Bench can serve as a robust foundation for advancing research into LRMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_22113
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle THINK-Bench: Evaluating Thinking Efficiency and Chain-of-Thought Quality of Large Reasoning Models
Li, Zhiyuan
Chang, Yi
Wu, Yuan
Computation and Language
Large reasoning models (LRMs) have achieved impressive performance in complex tasks, often outperforming conventional large language models (LLMs). However, the prevalent issue of overthinking severely limits their computational efficiency. Overthinking occurs when models generate excessive and redundant tokens that contribute little to accurate outcomes, especially in simple tasks, resulting in a significant waste of computational resources. To systematically investigate this issue, we introduce Think-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning efficiency of LRMs. We also propose novel efficiency metrics and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of various LRMs across multiple dimensions, including the reasoning process, outcome quality, and chain-of-thought (CoT) characteristics. Our analysis reveals that most LRMs exhibit overthinking in handling easy questions, generating unnecessarily lengthy reasoning chains. While many LRMs demonstrate high CoT quality, several suffer from low efficiency. We hope that Think-Bench can serve as a robust foundation for advancing research into LRMs.
title THINK-Bench: Evaluating Thinking Efficiency and Chain-of-Thought Quality of Large Reasoning Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22113