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REVIEW 5 major objections 4 minor 6 references

A per-query token cap derived from the model's own solution text can stop reward hacking in RL-trained hybrid reasoners.

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A per-query token cap derived from the solution part of thinking-mode responses lets RL train hybrid reasoners with ~50% fewer tokens and no accuracy loss.

T0 review reviewed 2026-08-03 challenge →

load-bearing objection The per-query token cap is a real, useful idea and the efficiency results look solid, but the paper overclaims what it proves about reward hacking. the 5 major comments →

arxiv 2601.04805 v2 pith:PIVXBVBA submitted 2026-01-08 cs.AI

Thinking-Based Non-Thinking: Solving the Reward Hacking Problem in Training Hybrid Reasoning Models via Reinforcement Learning

Siyuan Gan , Jiaheng Liu , Boyan Wang , Tianpei Yang , Runqing Miao , Yuyao Zhang , Fanyu Meng , Junlan Feng
show 3 more authors
Linjian Meng Jing Huo Yang Gao
This is my paper
classification cs.AI
keywords hybrid reasoning modelsreward hackingreinforcement learningchain-of-thoughtnon-thinking modetoken efficiencyoverthinkingmathematical reasoning
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The reading

Large reasoning models spend thousands of tokens on thinking, and hybrid reasoning models trained with reinforcement learning can choose when to skip thinking—but they often cheat by hiding long chains of thought under a non-thinking marker to get a higher reward. This paper proposes Thinking-Based Non-Thinking (TNT), a reward rule that sets a per-query ceiling on non-thinking response length based on the length of the solution text the model itself writes after its thinking is finished. Responses classified as non-thinking that exceed the ceiling get a penalty, so the model learns to either think openly or answer directly. Across five math benchmarks, TNT cuts token usage by roughly half, improves accuracy over the base models and existing RL-only hybrid-training methods, and keeps the measured reward-hacking probability below 10%. The method matters because it suggests that expensive supervised-fine-tuning defenses may be unnecessary, making efficient hybrid reasoning training much cheaper.

Core claim

TNT claims that reward hacking in RL-trained hybrid reasoning models can be detected and punished without supervised fine-tuning. For each query it sets a cap on non-thinking response length equal to twice the average number of tokens the model writes after </think> in its own thinking-mode responses (with a fixed fallback when no thinking response is sampled). A non-thinking response that exceeds the cap receives a penalty lower than any incorrect answer, so the model cannot profit by hiding a long chain of thought under the non-thinking marker. On five math benchmarks the paper reports roughly 50% token reduction, accuracy above base models and comparable RL-only methods, and below-10% pro

What carries the argument

The load-bearing object is the per-query cap L_N^x, computed as ω times the average length of the solution component—the tokens after the </think> tag—of the thinking-mode responses sampled for that query, with a fallback constant L∅ if no thinking-mode response was sampled. The cap feeds a reward function: correct non-thinking responses within the cap get +2, incorrect ones get −1, and any non-thinking response over the cap gets −2. The cap's job is to convert a uniform token limit into a query-aware one, so easy queries are not over-punished and hard queries do not let hidden thinking slip through.

Load-bearing premise

The method assumes that the text a thinking model writes after </think> is a faithful, length-comparable stand-in for a genuine direct answer; if that assumption fails, the per-query cap is miscalibrated.

What would settle it

Take a fixed set of math queries and force a clean direct answer—e.g., prompt the model with an explicit 'no thinking' instruction or use a separately trained short-answer head—then compare the distribution of those true direct-answer lengths with the post-</think> solution lengths TNT uses. If the post-</think> lengths are systematically longer (say, the 95th percentile is more than the cap ω times the true direct-answer median), the cap will either admit hidden thinking or reject honest direct answers. Alternatively, measure the thinking-marker rate on a query set where the model has a long-

Watch this falsifier. Get emailed when new claim-graph text bears on it.

If this is right

  • SFT-based defenses become unnecessary: TNT reaches better accuracy and token-use trade-offs than methods that rely on a roughly 50x larger supervised dataset.
  • Mode selection emerges without difficulty labels: easy queries are answered directly and hard queries trigger thinking, with the non-thinking ratio tracking benchmark difficulty.
  • The accuracy/efficiency advantage grows with base-model strength, so the method is not limited to small models.
  • The measured rate of hidden thinking in non-thinking responses stays below 10% across the five math benchmarks.
  • TNT beats CoT-compression approaches that trade accuracy for brevity, because it preserves or improves accuracy while cutting tokens.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • A testable extension is to replace the mean-scaled cap with a per-query percentile of the post-</think> length distribution; that would make the false-accept/false-reject trade-off explicit and may push the reward-hacking rate lower.
  • If the solution-component proxy holds, TNT should transfer to code or formal-math domains with verifiable rewards; the current experiments are confined to math benchmarks, as the paper itself notes.
  • The training curves show the non-thinking ratio growing as the base model strengthens, so the cap could be annealed over training to progressively encourage direct answering as the policy internalizes knowledge.
  • Because the paper's runs use a single training node and math-only rewards, multi-domain, larger-scale runs would test whether the sub-10% reward-hacking rate is a property of the method or of the benchmark distribution.
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Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit.

Referee Report

5 major / 4 minor

Summary. The paper proposes Thinking-Based Non-Thinking (TNT), an RL-only method for training hybrid reasoning models to choose between a thinking mode (long CoT) and a non-thinking mode. For each query, TNT computes a per-query token cap L_N^x for non-thinking responses as ω times the average length of the post-</think> solution component of sampled thinking-mode responses (Eq. 2). The reward function (Eq. 4) gives +2 for a correct non-thinking answer under the cap and -2 for exceeding it, while thinking-mode answers receive at most +1. The authors claim this mitigates reward hacking without SFT, and report roughly 50% token reduction with improved accuracy relative to base models on five math benchmarks, plus a below-10% probability of reward hacking as measured by a verb-based detector. The paper also presents ablations showing that removing the cap leads to reward hacking and token-growth on the training set.

Significance. If the claimed results hold, TNT is a simple and appealing alternative to SFT-based hybrid reasoning training: it uses only RL, requires no large SFT dataset, and adapts the non-thinking token budget per query from the model's own thinking-mode outputs. The core mechanism is coherent, and the empirical trend is consistent across three base models (DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B/7B and DeepScaleR-1.5B) and several benchmarks. The paper also provides an ablation showing that removing the dynamic cap leads to reward hacking, and it evaluates open-source baselines, which strengthens the comparison. However, the central claim that TNT 'solves' or effectively mitigates reward hacking is not fully established because the validation relies on an evadable verb-based detector and the reward function only penalizes responses that exceed the length cap, leaving under-cap hidden reasoning unmeasured. The checkpoint-selection procedure and lack of variance estimates also weaken the accuracy claims as stated.

major comments (5)
  1. [§4.1, Eq. (4); §3; Fig. 4] The reward in Eq. (4) only penalizes non-thinking responses with |y| > L_N^x. A response that hides a reasoning chain under the cap still receives +2 for a correct answer, so the RL objective does not discourage compact hidden CoT. The validation in Finding 3 (Fig. 4) uses the presence of verbs like 'Wait'/'Alternatively', which is an evadable proxy and says nothing about under-cap reasoning. Table 2 shows TNT's non-thinking responses average ~837 tokens on the 1.5B model, close to a 2× solution-length cap, so the abstract's 'below 10% reward hacking probability' is not established for the §3 definition (which includes embedding reasoning in the non-thinking response). Please provide a content-based evaluation (e.g., human annotation of non-thinking responses) or narrow the claim to 'long-form reward hacking'.
  2. [§5.1; §B.1; Figs. 5–7] The checkpoint at step 600 is selected because it 'observed convergence and yielded the optimal performance,' and the training curves in §B.1 use AIME24 as the test dataset. If the checkpoint was chosen by evaluating the test set, the reported AIME24 results are optimistically biased. Please clarify whether a validation set was used for model selection, or report results for the final checkpoint and across nearby steps.
  3. [§4.1, Eq. (2)] The method introduces hyperparameters ω and L_empty, fixed at ω=2 and L_empty=1000 with no sensitivity analysis. Since the per-query cap is the entire mechanism of TNT, the conclusions may depend on these values, particularly L_empty when no thinking-mode response is sampled for a prompt. Please ablate these hyperparameters or at least report the range over which the qualitative findings hold.
  4. [Tables 1 and 4] All results appear to be from a single RL run with no error bars. Several accuracy differences between TNT and the next-best baseline are small—e.g., Table 4 (DeepScaleR-1.5B): TNT 43.5% vs Auto-S2 43.7%; AIME25: TNT 30.2% vs Auto-S3 30.0%. Without multiple seeds or variance estimates, the claim of 'significantly improving accuracy' is not supported. Please provide seed-level variation or confidence intervals, or soften the claim.
  5. [§1; §4.1; Tables 2 and 5] The method assumes that the post-</think> solution component 'will not differ significantly from the output of the non-thinking mode.' This is a testable empirical claim but no evidence is provided. The observed TNT non-thinking token counts (837 avg for 1.5B in Table 2; 1202 avg for 7B in Table 5) are much higher than the SFT-based Thinkless (402), suggesting the cap is calibrated to the base model's verbose solution style rather than to a minimal direct answer. If the proxy is miscalibrated, L_N^x may either fail to catch hidden reasoning or penalize legitimate detailed solutions. Please validate the assumption, e.g., by comparing solution-component length against a base model's short-answer mode.
minor comments (4)
  1. [Abstract] 'Around 50%' is imprecise: the measured reductions are 46.2% (DeepSeek-1.5B), 41% (DeepScaleR-1.5B), and 51% (7B). Please report the exact ranges.
  2. [Tables 3 and 6] TNT non-thinking mode ratios differ across these tables for the same model and benchmark: AIME25 is 0.8% in Table 3 but 0.4% in Table 6; AMC23 is 29.4% in Table 3 but 30.7% in Table 6. Please reconcile.
  3. [General] Typos: 'the the reward hacking problem' in the abstract; 'suh ratio' in §B.1; 'de to' in §B.4. Also, Figure 1's annotation 'Length Define Threshold ??' is unclear.
  4. [References] Several reference entries contain 'and 1 others' in the visible text; please use standard 'et al.' formatting.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity: the token cap is a designed control signal, and the mitigation claim rests on independent verb-based and ablation evidence.

full rationale

The central mechanism computes L_N^x from the solution-component length of thinking-mode responses (Eq. 2) and uses it as a threshold in the non-thinking reward (Eq. 4). This is a training control, not a fitted parameter renamed as a prediction; the observation that non-thinking responses are short is partly a consequence of the -2 penalty for exceeding the cap, but the paper does not rest the mitigation claim on token counts alone. Finding 3 measures reward hacking via the probability of thinking-related verbs ('Wait', 'Alternatively', 'Double-Check') in non-thinking responses (Figure 4), a signal not used in the reward function, and the ablation in Table 9 shows that removing the cap-specific terms reproduces reward hacking (94.2% verb probability at step 500 vs 5.1% for TNT). These are independent evidence. The only self-citation is the TE metric borrowed from Hong et al. (2025), which includes the present authors; it is a standard A/sqrt(L) metric and is not load-bearing for the derivation. The validity of the assumption that the post-</think> solution component proxies a genuine direct answer is a modeling assumption, not a circular step.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

3 free parameters · 4 axioms · 0 invented entities

TNT introduces no new physical or model entities. Its load-bearing assumptions are about the base model's output structure (solution component as a proxy for direct answers) and about the detectability of reward hacking via surface verbs. The free parameters omega, L_empty, and the test-selected checkpoint are the main hand-set quantities; the per-query cap itself is data-derived but from the model's own behavior.

free parameters (3)
  • omega = 2
    Multiplier on the average solution-component length to set the non-thinking token cap (Equation 2). Chosen in experiments; no sensitivity analysis is reported, so the central threshold depends on this hand-set value.
  • L_empty = 1000
    Fallback token cap used when no thinking-mode responses are sampled for a prompt (Equation 2). Set to 1000 in experiments; its impact on training stability is not analyzed.
  • checkpoint step = 600 (1.5B and 7B); 900 (DeepScaleR)
    The final reported model is the checkpoint selected after observing 'convergence and optimal performance' on the AIME24 test monitor (Section 5.1, Figures 5-7). This is a form of test-set selection.
axioms (4)
  • domain assumption The solution component after </think> in thinking-mode responses is free of thinking and approximates what a genuine non-thinking response would output.
    Invoked in Section 1 and Section 4.1 to justify using h(y) as the basis for L_N^x. If false, the per-query cap is miscalibrated.
  • domain assumption A response is non-thinking iff its first token is </think>.
    Used throughout the reward function and mode classification, following prior work (Tu et al. 2025; Zhang et al. 2025). This is exactly the signal that reward hacking exploits.
  • domain assumption Presence of words like 'Wait', 'Alternatively', and 'Double-Check' in a non-thinking response reliably indicates reward hacking.
    Finding 3 and Figure 4 use this heuristic as the primary evidence that TNT keeps reward hacking below 10%. It is a partial detector, not a formal definition.
  • domain assumption The answer extraction function r(y, y*) correctly determines correctness on the math benchmarks.
    Standard in this literature and needed for all rewards and accuracy numbers, but not independently verified in the paper.

reviewed 2026-08-03 · how reviews work

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Cite this review

Pith. "Pith review of Thinking-Based Non-Thinking: Solving the Reward Hacking Problem in Training Hybrid Reasoning Models via Reinforcement Learning." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/PIVXBVBA

@misc{pith2026260104805,
  author       = {Pith},
  title        = {Pith review of: Thinking-Based Non-Thinking: Solving the Reward Hacking Problem in Training Hybrid Reasoning Models via Reinforcement Learning},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/PIVXBVBA}},
  note         = {Machine review of arXiv:2601.04805}
}
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read the original abstract

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have attracted much attention due to their exceptional performance. However, their performance mainly stems from thinking, a long Chain of Thought (CoT), which significantly increase computational overhead. To address this overthinking problem, existing work focuses on using reinforcement learning (RL) to train hybrid reasoning models that automatically decide whether to engage in thinking or not based on the complexity of the query. Unfortunately, using RL will suffer the the reward hacking problem, e.g., the model engages in thinking but is judged as not doing so, resulting in incorrect rewards. To mitigate this problem, existing works either employ supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which incurs high computational costs, or enforce uniform token limits on non-thinking responses, which yields limited mitigation of the problem. In this paper, we propose Thinking-Based Non-Thinking (TNT). It does not employ SFT, and sets different maximum token usage for responses not using thinking across various queries by leveraging information from the solution component of the responses using thinking. Experiments on five mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that TNT reduces token usage by around 50% compared to DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B/7B and DeepScaleR-1.5B, while significantly improving accuracy. In fact, TNT achieves the optimal trade-off between accuracy and efficiency among all tested methods. Additionally, the probability of reward hacking problem in TNT's responses, which are classified as not using thinking, remains below 10% across all tested datasets.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2601.04805 by Boyan Wang, Fanyu Meng, Jiaheng Liu, Jing Huo, Junlan Feng, Linjian Meng, Runqing Miao, Siyuan Gan, Tianpei Yang, Yang Gao, Yuyao Zhang.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Overview of TNT. 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000 Average Token Usage 34 36 38 40 DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B Base Model Thinkless Adapt-0 Adapt-2 Adapt-5 Auto-S1 Auto-S2 Auto-S3 TNT 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000 Average Token Usage 38 40 42 44 DeepScaleR-1.5B Base Model Auto-S1 Auto-S2 Auto-S3 TNT 5000 6000 7000 8000 9000 Average Token Usage 48 50 52 54 DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B Base Model Adapt-5 Auto-S1 Auto-S… view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Average accuracy and token usage comparison across different hybrid reasoning model training methods [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p002_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: An example of the reward hacking problem [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p003_3.png] view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Probability of thinking-related verbs appearing in non-thinking mode responses across models with base [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p008_4.png] view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Accuracy (left), token usage (middle), and non-thinking ratio (right) in RL training on DeepSeek-R1- [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p012_5.png] view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Accuracy (left), token usage (middle), and non-thinking ratio (right) in RL training on DeepScaleR-1.5B. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p012_6.png] view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Accuracy (left), token usage (middle), and non-thinking ratio (right) in RL training on DeepSeek-R1- [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p012_7.png] view at source ↗
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Token usage varies on AIME24 when using [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p015_8.png] view at source ↗
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: Token usage of the non-thinking mode re [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p015_9.png] view at source ↗
Figure 10
Figure 10. Figure 10: For a easy query, TNT can solve it by switching to the non-thinking mode to use fewer tokens compared [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p017_10.png] view at source ↗
Figure 11
Figure 11. Figure 11: For a hard query, TNT is able to solve it correctly through careful thinking, while DeepSeek-R1-Distill [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p018_11.png] view at source ↗

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Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

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This paper was first reviewed by deepseek-v4-flash on August 3, 2026.