Confidence-Aware Reasoning: Optimizing Self-Guided Thinking Trajectories in Large Reasoning Models (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought enables large reasoning models to reason through multi-step problems but often leads to unnecessarily long or redundant reasoning traces, a phenomenon known as overthinking. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference-time framework that selectively prunes low-utility reasoning blocks and halts early when sufficient confidence has been achieved. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves answer accuracy by up to +13.3% while reducing average reasoning length by 40%–50%. |
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Xiaoyun Zhang, Jingqing Ruan, Xing Ma, Yawen Zhu, Haodong Zhao, Hao Li, Jiansong Chen, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai
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