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Not All Tokens Are What You Need In Thinking

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arxiv 2505.17827 v2 pith:FLMFCF6S submitted 2025-05-23 cs.CL

Not All Tokens Are What You Need In Thinking

classification cs.CL
keywords tokensreasoningtokenaccuracycompressionconditionalmodelsonly
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Modern reasoning models, such as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek-R1, exhibit impressive problem-solving capabilities but suffer from critical inefficiencies: high inference latency, excessive computational resource consumption, and a tendency toward overthinking -- generating verbose chains of thought (CoT) laden with redundant tokens that contribute minimally to the final answer. To address these issues, we propose Conditional Token Selection (CTS), a token-level compression framework with a flexible and variable compression ratio that identifies and preserves only the most essential tokens in CoT. CTS evaluates each token's contribution to deriving correct answers using conditional importance scoring, then trains models on compressed CoT. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CTS effectively compresses long CoT while maintaining strong reasoning performance. Notably, on the GPQA benchmark, Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct trained with CTS achieves a 9.1% accuracy improvement with 13.2% fewer reasoning tokens (13% training token reduction). Further reducing training tokens by 42% incurs only a marginal 5% accuracy drop while yielding a 75.8% reduction in reasoning tokens, highlighting the prevalence of redundancy in existing CoT.

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Forward citations

Cited by 8 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Post Reasoning: Improving the Performance of Non-Thinking Models at No Cost

    cs.AI 2026-05 conditional novelty 7.0

    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.

  2. Reasoning Denoiser: Denoising Reasoning Traces for Hallucination Detection in Large Reasoning Models

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    REDE removes irrelevant and repetitive reasoning steps using final-answer attention as supervision, improving hallucination detection AUROC by up to ~19 points over unfiltered traces.

  3. Stateful Reasoning via Insight Replay

    cs.AI 2026-05 conditional novelty 6.0

    InsightReplay improves LLM accuracy on reasoning benchmarks by extracting and replaying critical insights to maintain their accessibility during extended chain-of-thought generation.

  4. Stateful Reasoning via Insight Replay

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    InsightReplay improves long CoT reasoning by extracting critical insights from the trace and replaying them near the active frontier, delivering +1.65 average accuracy gain across 24 model-benchmark settings.

  5. Towards Efficient Large Language Reasoning Models via Extreme-Ratio Chain-of-Thought Compression

    cs.LG 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Extra-CoT trains a semantic compressor on math CoT data, applies mixed-ratio SFT, and uses CHRPO reinforcement learning to achieve over 73% token reduction on MATH-500 with 0.6% accuracy gain on Qwen3-1.7B.

  6. Towards Efficient Large Language Reasoning Models via Extreme-Ratio Chain-of-Thought Compression

    cs.LG 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0

    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.

  7. LISA: Linear-Indexed Sparse Attention for Efficient Long-Context Reasoning

    cs.AI 2026-05 reject novelty 5.0

    LISA replaces standard attention with linear attention plus indexer-selected sparse attention, claiming O(nM) inference cost and accuracy gains, but the complexity analysis ignores the indexer's full-context scoring.

  8. Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-03 accept novelty 5.0

    A survey organizing techniques to achieve efficient reasoning in LLMs by shortening chain-of-thought outputs.