Increasing the Thinking Budget is Not All You Need

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Iacobacci, Ignacio, Qian, Zhaozhi, AL-Tam, Faroq, AL-Qurishi, Muhammad, Souissi, Riad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Iacobacci, Ignacio
Qian, Zhaozhi
AL-Tam, Faroq
AL-Qurishi, Muhammad
Souissi, Riad
author_facet Iacobacci, Ignacio
Qian, Zhaozhi
AL-Tam, Faroq
AL-Qurishi, Muhammad
Souissi, Riad
contents Recently, a new wave of thinking-capable Large Language Models has emerged, demonstrating exceptional capabilities across a wide range of reasoning benchmarks. Early studies have begun to explore how the amount of compute in terms of the length of the reasoning process, the so-called thinking budget, impacts model performance. In this work, we propose a systematic investigation of the thinking budget as a key parameter, examining its interaction with various configurations such as self-consistency, reflection, and others. Our goal is to provide an informative, balanced comparison framework that considers both performance outcomes and computational cost. Among our findings, we discovered that simply increasing the thinking budget is not the most effective use of compute. More accurate responses can instead be achieved through alternative configurations, such as self-consistency and self-reflection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_19585
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Increasing the Thinking Budget is Not All You Need
Iacobacci, Ignacio
Qian, Zhaozhi
AL-Tam, Faroq
AL-Qurishi, Muhammad
Souissi, Riad
Computation and Language
Recently, a new wave of thinking-capable Large Language Models has emerged, demonstrating exceptional capabilities across a wide range of reasoning benchmarks. Early studies have begun to explore how the amount of compute in terms of the length of the reasoning process, the so-called thinking budget, impacts model performance. In this work, we propose a systematic investigation of the thinking budget as a key parameter, examining its interaction with various configurations such as self-consistency, reflection, and others. Our goal is to provide an informative, balanced comparison framework that considers both performance outcomes and computational cost. Among our findings, we discovered that simply increasing the thinking budget is not the most effective use of compute. More accurate responses can instead be achieved through alternative configurations, such as self-consistency and self-reflection.
title Increasing the Thinking Budget is Not All You Need
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19585