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Main Authors: Liu, Cong, Chai, Wenchang, Wu, Hejun, Pan, Yan, Wei, Pengxu, Lin, Liang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18648
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author Liu, Cong
Chai, Wenchang
Wu, Hejun
Pan, Yan
Wei, Pengxu
Lin, Liang
author_facet Liu, Cong
Chai, Wenchang
Wu, Hejun
Pan, Yan
Wei, Pengxu
Lin, Liang
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit deficiencies with complex reasoning tasks, such as maths, which we attribute to the discrepancy between human reasoning patterns and those presented in the LLMs' training data. When dealing with complex problems, humans tend to think carefully before expressing solutions. However, they often do not articulate their inner thoughts, including their intentions and chosen methodologies. Consequently, critical insights essential for bridging reasoning steps may be absent in training data collected from human sources. To bridge this gap, we proposes inserting \emph{insight}s between consecutive reasoning steps, which review the status and initiate the next reasoning steps. Unlike prior prompting strategies that rely on a single or a workflow of static prompts to facilitate reasoning, \emph{insight}s are \emph{proactively} generated to guide reasoning processes. We implement our idea as a reasoning framework, named \emph{Thinking Before You Speak} (TBYS), and design a pipeline for automatically collecting and filtering in-context examples for the generation of \emph{insight}s, which alleviates human labeling efforts and fine-tuning overheads. Experiments on challenging mathematical datasets verify the effectiveness of TBYS. Project website: https://gitee.com/jswrt/TBYS
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_18648
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Thinking Before You Speak: A Proactive Test-time Scaling Approach
Liu, Cong
Chai, Wenchang
Wu, Hejun
Pan, Yan
Wei, Pengxu
Lin, Liang
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit deficiencies with complex reasoning tasks, such as maths, which we attribute to the discrepancy between human reasoning patterns and those presented in the LLMs' training data. When dealing with complex problems, humans tend to think carefully before expressing solutions. However, they often do not articulate their inner thoughts, including their intentions and chosen methodologies. Consequently, critical insights essential for bridging reasoning steps may be absent in training data collected from human sources. To bridge this gap, we proposes inserting \emph{insight}s between consecutive reasoning steps, which review the status and initiate the next reasoning steps. Unlike prior prompting strategies that rely on a single or a workflow of static prompts to facilitate reasoning, \emph{insight}s are \emph{proactively} generated to guide reasoning processes. We implement our idea as a reasoning framework, named \emph{Thinking Before You Speak} (TBYS), and design a pipeline for automatically collecting and filtering in-context examples for the generation of \emph{insight}s, which alleviates human labeling efforts and fine-tuning overheads. Experiments on challenging mathematical datasets verify the effectiveness of TBYS. Project website: https://gitee.com/jswrt/TBYS
title Thinking Before You Speak: A Proactive Test-time Scaling Approach
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18648