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Betweenunderthinkingandoverthinking: Anempiricalstudyofreasoninglengthandcorrectnessinllms.arXivpreprint

26 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

26 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly optimized for long reasoning, under the assumption that more reasoning leads to better performance. However, emerging evidence suggests that longer responses can sometimes degrade accuracy rather than improve it. In this paper, we conduct a systematic empirical study of the relationship between reasoning length and answer correctness. We find that LLMs tend to overthink simple problems, generating unnecessarily long outputs, and underthink harder ones, failing to extend their reasoning when it is most needed. This indicates that models might misjudge problem difficulty and fail to calibrate their response length appropriately. Furthermore, we investigate the effects of length reduction with a preference optimization algorithm when simply preferring the shorter responses regardless of answer correctness. Experiments show that the generation length can be significantly reduced while maintaining acceptable accuracy. Our findings highlight generation length as a meaningful signal for reasoning behavior and motivate further exploration into LLMs' self-awareness in reasoning length adaptation.

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representative citing papers

Faster Synchronous On-Policy RL via Straggler-Aware Group Sizing

cs.LG · 2026-06-01 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

SAGC dynamically adjusts group sizes in synchronous GRPO and DAPO via online constrained optimization to cut stragglers, improve wall-clock speed, and maintain or improve rewards and downstream reasoning performance.

CARE: Competence-Aware Reward Shaping for Adaptive Reasoning Length in Video-MLLMs

cs.CV · 2026-06-18 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

CARE uses exponential moving average competence estimates to progressively shift RL rewards from exploration-oriented long reasoning to efficiency-oriented concise reasoning in video-MLLMs, with batch normalization and posterior amplification, yielding accuracy gains and shorter traces.

An Asymptotic Theory of Chain-of-Thought in In-Context Learning

stat.ML · 2026-06-02 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Exact RMT-derived formula for CoT generalization error in linear ICL reveals phase transition between exponential/polynomial improvement, saturation, and overthinking regimes depending on depth, pretraining, and context length.

LACO: Adaptive Latent Communication for Collaborative Driving

cs.AI · 2026-05-21 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

LACO introduces Iterative Latent Deliberation, Cross-Horizon Saliency Attribution, and Structured Semantic Knowledge Distillation to enable low-latency latent communication in collaborative driving while preserving performance in CARLA simulations.

CLORE: Content-Level Optimization for Reasoning Efficiency

cs.AI · 2026-05-21 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

CLORE augments correct on-policy rollouts by deleting repetitive and irrelevant segments then optimizes with auxiliary DPO to improve accuracy-efficiency trade-off on math benchmarks.

Reasoning Models Don't Just Think Longer, They Move Differently

cs.CL · 2026-05-14 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0 · 2 refs

After length correction, reasoning-trained language models exhibit distinct hidden-state trajectory geometries on harder problems compared to instruction-tuned baselines, with the strongest effect in code domains.

Trust Region On-Policy Distillation

cs.LG · 2026-05-31 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

TrOPD stabilizes on-policy distillation for LLMs with trust-region learning, outlier estimation, and off-policy guidance, outperforming prior OPD methods on reasoning and code benchmarks.

Self-Aligned Reward: Towards Effective and Efficient Reasoners

cs.LG · 2025-09-05 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

Self-aligned reward uses relative perplexity differences to encourage concise, query-specific reasoning in LLMs, yielding 4% accuracy gains and 30% lower inference cost when added to PPO or GRPO.

Critique of Agent Model

cs.AI · 2026-06-22 · unverdicted · novelty 4.0

Distinguishes agentic (externally scaffolded) from agentive (internally structured) AI systems and proposes the Goal-Identity-Configurator architecture for endogenous autonomy.

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