| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been proven effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting approach that enables LLMs to selectively skip less important tokens, allowing for controllable CoT compression. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TokenSkip reduces CoT token usage while preserving strong reasoning performance. |
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Token-Budget-Aware LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance reasoning capabilities of large language models incur significant overhead in token usage, leading to increased costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-budget-aware LLM reasoning framework that adjusts the number of reasoning tokens based on the reasoning complexity of each problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces token costs in CoT reasoning with only a slight performance reduction. |
From Long to Lean: Performance-aware and Adaptive Chain-of-Thought Compression via Multi-round Refinement (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought reasoning introduces significant inference latency due to its verbosity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages token elasticity phenomenon to progressively compress CoTs via multiround refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average accuracy improvement of 5.6% over state-of-the-art baselines while reducing CoT length by an average of 47 tokens and significantly lowering latency. |
Think Faster Than Words: Efficient LLM Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Dynamic Shortcut Decoding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that prune or employ early stopping to reduce latency often compromise reasoning reliability. |
| Approach: | They propose a shortcut decoding framework that integrates probes over internal hidden states with step-level entropy to detect convergence of reasoning during generation and adaptively selects between a fast-exit path and a stability-verified path to remove redundant steps while preserving answer correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage by approximately 35% and maintains accuracy comparable to full CoT decoding. |
Can Reasoning Path still be Effective as Input? Bridging Post-Reasoning to Chain-of-Thought Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Chengzhengxu Li, Xiaoming Liu, Zhaohan Zhang, Shengchao Liu, Guoxin Ma, Yu Lan, Cong Wang, Chao Shen
| Challenge: | Existing work on reducing CoT generation in reasoning impairs the necessary information for deriving the correct answer. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning paradigm that takes CoT as a part of context to simplify the reasoning task for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the generation length of LLMs, but its effectiveness hinges on the efficiency and reliability of the contextual CoT generation. |
LightThinker: Thinking Step-by-Step Compression (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jintian Zhang, Yuqi Zhu, Mengshu Sun, Yujie Luo, Shuofei Qiao, Lun Du, Da Zheng, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have demonstrated their remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, but their efficiency is hindered by the substantial memory and computational costs associated with generating lengthy tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically compresses verbose thought steps into compact representations and discards original reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces peak memory usage and inference time while maintaining competitive accuracy. |
CAC-CoT: Connector-Aware Compact Chain-of-Thought for Efficient Reasoning Data Synthesis Across Dual-System Cognitive Tasks (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Long chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting often slows or even degrades performance on fast, intuitive "System-1" tasks. |
| Approach: | They introduce a method that deliberately restricts reasoning to a small, fixed set of connector phrases, steering the model toward concise and well-structured explanations. |
| Outcome: | The method achieves 85% on GSM8K and 40% on GPQA while also surpassing the baseline by over 20%. |
SoftCoT: Soft Chain-of-Thought for Efficient Reasoning with LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to continuous-space reasoning focus on hard token decoding and suffer from catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates instance-specific soft thought tokens as the initial chain of thoughts and maps them into the LLM’s representation space via a trainable projection module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLM reasoning performance through supervised, parameter-efficient fine-tuning. |
CODI: Compressing Chain-of-Thought into Continuous Space via Self-Distillation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior implicit CoT methods have underperformed in terms of efficiency and robustness by relying on natural language tokens for reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that compresses natural language CoT into continuous space by aligning hidden states of a designated token. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the existing state-of-the-art in 3.1x compression rate and 28.2% accuracy on GSM8k scale. |
CoT-Valve: Length-Compressible Chain-of-Thought Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Wei et al., 2022) have developed a powerful method for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a tuning and inference strategy to control the length of reasoning chains by a parameter space direction to control their length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces reasoning chains on GSM8K from 741 to 225 tokens with a minor performance drop (95.07% to 94.92%) and on AIME from 6827 to 4629 tokens, with only one additional incorrect answer. |
LLMLingua: Compressing Prompts for Accelerated Inference of Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly lengthy and require longer prompts . this paper presents a coarse-to-fine prompt compression method to reduce cost and increase performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse-to-fine prompt compression method that maintains semantic integrity under high compression ratios and a token-level iterative compression algorithm to better model the interdependence between compressed contents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method yields state-of-the-art performance and allows for up to 20x compression with little performance loss over four datasets from different scenarios. |