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Hauptverfasser: Han, Wei, Zhan, Geng, Yu, Sicheng, Wang, Chenyu, Hooi, Bryan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06174
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author Han, Wei
Zhan, Geng
Yu, Sicheng
Wang, Chenyu
Hooi, Bryan
author_facet Han, Wei
Zhan, Geng
Yu, Sicheng
Wang, Chenyu
Hooi, Bryan
contents O1/R1 style large reasoning models (LRMs) signal a substantial leap forward over conventional instruction-following LLMs. By applying test-time scaling to generate extended reasoning paths, they establish many SOTAs across a wide range of complex reasoning tasks. However, recent studies show that LRMs are prone to suffer from overthinking -- the tendency to overcomplicate simple problems, leading to excessive strategy switching and long, convoluted reasoning traces that hinder their interpretability. To mitigate this issue, we conduct a systematic investigation into the reasoning efficiency of a broad set of LRMs and uncover a common dilemma: the difficulty in balancing multiple generation objectives such as correctness and brevity. Based on this discovery, we propose a test-time scaling method, EDIT (Efficient Dynamic Inference Trimming), which efficiently guides LRMs to identify the shortest correct reasoning paths at test time. EDIT employs constraint-guided generation while jointly tracking length and answer distributions under varying constraints, allowing it to select responses that strike an optimal balance between conciseness and correctness. Extensive experiments across diverse models and datasets show that EDIT substantially enhance the reasoning efficiency, producing compact yet informative outputs that improve readability and user experience.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_06174
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Long to Short: LLMs Excel at Trimming Own Reasoning Chains
Han, Wei
Zhan, Geng
Yu, Sicheng
Wang, Chenyu
Hooi, Bryan
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
O1/R1 style large reasoning models (LRMs) signal a substantial leap forward over conventional instruction-following LLMs. By applying test-time scaling to generate extended reasoning paths, they establish many SOTAs across a wide range of complex reasoning tasks. However, recent studies show that LRMs are prone to suffer from overthinking -- the tendency to overcomplicate simple problems, leading to excessive strategy switching and long, convoluted reasoning traces that hinder their interpretability. To mitigate this issue, we conduct a systematic investigation into the reasoning efficiency of a broad set of LRMs and uncover a common dilemma: the difficulty in balancing multiple generation objectives such as correctness and brevity. Based on this discovery, we propose a test-time scaling method, EDIT (Efficient Dynamic Inference Trimming), which efficiently guides LRMs to identify the shortest correct reasoning paths at test time. EDIT employs constraint-guided generation while jointly tracking length and answer distributions under varying constraints, allowing it to select responses that strike an optimal balance between conciseness and correctness. Extensive experiments across diverse models and datasets show that EDIT substantially enhance the reasoning efficiency, producing compact yet informative outputs that improve readability and user experience.
title From Long to Short: LLMs Excel at Trimming Own Reasoning Chains
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06174