Post-Reasoning boosts LLM accuracy by reversing the usual answer-after-reasoning order, delivering mean relative gains of 17.37% across 117 model-benchmark pairs with zero extra cost.
How well do llms compress their own chain-of-thought? a token complexity approach
10 Pith papers cite this work, alongside 1 external citations. Polarity classification is still indexing.
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abstract
Chain-of-thought prompting has emerged as a powerful technique for enabling large language models (LLMs) to solve complex reasoning tasks. However, these reasoning chains can be verbose, raising concerns about efficiency. In response, recent works have sought to decrease response lengths through simple prompting strategies (e.g. 'be concise'). In this work, we conduct the first systematic study of the relationship between reasoning length and model performance across a diverse range of compression instructions (e.g. 'use 10 words or less' or 'remove all punctuation'). In doing so, we discover a universal tradeoff between reasoning length and accuracy that persists across even very distinct reasoning chains. We demonstrate that this tradeoff emerges from a sharp threshold behavior at the question level: each task has an intrinsic 'token complexity' - a minimal number of tokens required for successful problem-solving. We show how token complexity enables us to compute information-theoretic limits on the accuracy-compression tradeoff, and find that prompt-based compression strategies operate far from these theoretical limits. This suggests there may be significant room for improvement and our framework provides a benchmark to help researchers evaluate progress in reasoning efficiency. Our work also highlights the importance of adaptive compression -- giving shorter responses for easier questions -- and we show that token complexity is a useful tool for measuring this capability.
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A learned weighted sum of intermediate-layer activations compresses an instruction prompt into a single patch vector that, injected at an early layer, recovers task accuracy within ~2% of the full prompt.
Dynamic Rollout Editing reduces overthinking in RL-trained LLMs by editing post-answer continuations in successful rollouts and preferring the edited versions within GRPO groups.
ThoughtFold applies introspective redundancy detection within correct CoT trajectories to create sub-trajectory spectra, then uses masked preference optimization to penalize redundant explorations, yielding 56% token reduction on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B while preserving accuracy.
A pipeline combining a question-aware formula-preserving compressor, mixed-ratio SFT, and hierarchical RL compresses CoT on math benchmarks to ~27% of original tokens while preserving or slightly improving accuracy.
HAB applies coarse-to-fine budgeting to LLM reasoning, predicting per-problem depth and learning intra-step token budgets via PPL comparisons and adaptive Pareto optimization, yielding higher accuracy and lower token use than standard CoT on GSM8K and MATH500.
SLAT applies segment-level adaptive trimming in RL to reduce CoT reasoning length by 50% while maintaining competitive accuracy on benchmarks.
Mixed-Policy Distillation transfers concise reasoning behavior from larger to smaller LLMs by having the teacher compress student-generated trajectories, cutting token usage up to 27% while raising benchmark scores.
An LLM-based framework recommends drill-down paths in visual analytics by approximating a greedy algorithm, interpreting user intent, and managing exploration branches to reduce cognitive load.
A survey organizing techniques to achieve efficient reasoning in LLMs by shortening chain-of-thought outputs.
citing papers explorer
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Post Reasoning: Improving the Performance of Non-Thinking Models at No Cost
Post-Reasoning boosts LLM accuracy by reversing the usual answer-after-reasoning order, delivering mean relative gains of 17.37% across 117 model-benchmark pairs with zero extra cost.
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Prompt Compression via Activation Aggregation
A learned weighted sum of intermediate-layer activations compresses an instruction prompt into a single patch vector that, injected at an early layer, recovers task accuracy within ~2% of the full prompt.
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Dynamic Rollout Editing for Reducing Overthinking in RL-Trained Reasoning Models
Dynamic Rollout Editing reduces overthinking in RL-trained LLMs by editing post-answer continuations in successful rollouts and preferring the edited versions within GRPO groups.
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ThoughtFold: Folding Reasoning Chains via Introspective Preference Learning
ThoughtFold applies introspective redundancy detection within correct CoT trajectories to create sub-trajectory spectra, then uses masked preference optimization to penalize redundant explorations, yielding 56% token reduction on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B while preserving accuracy.
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Towards Efficient Large Language Reasoning Models via Extreme-Ratio Chain-of-Thought Compression
A pipeline combining a question-aware formula-preserving compressor, mixed-ratio SFT, and hierarchical RL compresses CoT on math benchmarks to ~27% of original tokens while preserving or slightly improving accuracy.
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Thinking Economically: A Hierarchical Framework for Adaptive-Complexity Reasoning in LLMs
HAB applies coarse-to-fine budgeting to LLM reasoning, predicting per-problem depth and learning intra-step token budgets via PPL comparisons and adaptive Pareto optimization, yielding higher accuracy and lower token use than standard CoT on GSM8K and MATH500.
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SLAT: Segment-Level Adaptive Trimming for Efficient CoT Reasoning
SLAT applies segment-level adaptive trimming in RL to reduce CoT reasoning length by 50% while maintaining competitive accuracy on benchmarks.
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Reasoning Compression with Mixed-Policy Distillation
Mixed-Policy Distillation transfers concise reasoning behavior from larger to smaller LLMs by having the teacher compress student-generated trajectories, cutting token usage up to 27% while raising benchmark scores.
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Intelligent Drill-Down: Large Language Model-Driven Drill-Down Technique for Human-AI Collaborative Visual Exploration
An LLM-based framework recommends drill-down paths in visual analytics by approximating a greedy algorithm, interpreting user intent, and managing exploration branches to reduce cognitive load.
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Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models
A survey organizing techniques to achieve efficient reasoning in LLMs by shortening chain-of-thought outputs.