Efficient Reasoning via Thought-Training and Thought-Free Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wu, Canhui, Cao, Qiong, Xue, Chao, Xi, Wei, He, Xiaodong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wu, Canhui
Cao, Qiong
Xue, Chao
Xi, Wei
He, Xiaodong
author_facet Wu, Canhui
Cao, Qiong
Xue, Chao
Xi, Wei
He, Xiaodong
contents Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have leveraged explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to improve reasoning accuracy. However, most existing methods primarily focus on compressing verbose reasoning outputs. These Long-to-Short transformations aim to improve efficiency, but require a large amount of short CoT data. In this work, we introduce \textbf{3TF} (\textbf{T}hought-\textbf{T}raining and \textbf{T}hought-\textbf{F}ree inference), a framework for efficient reasoning that takes a Short-to-Long perspective. We first train a hybrid model that can operate in both reasoning and non-reasoning modes, and then further train it on CoT-annotated data to internalize structured reasoning, while enforcing concise, thought-free outputs at inference time using the no-reasoning mode. Unlike compression-based approaches, 3TF improves the reasoning quality of non-reasoning outputs, enabling models to perform rich internal reasoning implicitly while keeping external outputs short. Empirically, 3TF-trained models obtain large improvements on reasoning benchmarks under thought-free inference, demonstrating that high quality reasoning can be learned and executed implicitly without explicit step-by-step generation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_03408
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Reasoning via Thought-Training and Thought-Free Inference
Wu, Canhui
Cao, Qiong
Xue, Chao
Xi, Wei
He, Xiaodong
Computation and Language
I.2.7
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have leveraged explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to improve reasoning accuracy. However, most existing methods primarily focus on compressing verbose reasoning outputs. These Long-to-Short transformations aim to improve efficiency, but require a large amount of short CoT data. In this work, we introduce \textbf{3TF} (\textbf{T}hought-\textbf{T}raining and \textbf{T}hought-\textbf{F}ree inference), a framework for efficient reasoning that takes a Short-to-Long perspective. We first train a hybrid model that can operate in both reasoning and non-reasoning modes, and then further train it on CoT-annotated data to internalize structured reasoning, while enforcing concise, thought-free outputs at inference time using the no-reasoning mode. Unlike compression-based approaches, 3TF improves the reasoning quality of non-reasoning outputs, enabling models to perform rich internal reasoning implicitly while keeping external outputs short. Empirically, 3TF-trained models obtain large improvements on reasoning benchmarks under thought-free inference, demonstrating that high quality reasoning can be learned and executed implicitly without explicit step-by-step generation.
title Efficient Reasoning via Thought-Training and Thought-Free Inference
topic Computation and Language
I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03408