Think Better, Not Longer: Token-Level Marginal Utility for Efficient Reasoning in Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) generate explicit Chain-of-Thought rationales, but often suffer from "overthinking". |
| Approach: | They propose a unified training framework to synthesize concise reasoning chains by identifying tokens that reduce the model’s likelihood of the correct answer. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on deepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen backbones show that MUTO yields better efficiency-accuracy Pareto frontier. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Chain-of-Thought reasoning are often degraded because they disregard the model’s intrinsic reasoning dependency. |
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Chengzhengxu Li, Xiaoming Liu, Zhaohan Zhang, Shengchao Liu, Guoxin Ma, Yu Lan, Cong Wang, Chao Shen
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Thinking Economically: A Hierarchical Framework for Adaptive-Complexity Reasoning in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Yubo Gao, Haotian Wu, Hong Chen, Junquan Huang, Yibo Yan, Jungang Li, Zihao Dongfang, Sicheng Tao, PS Tan, Jie Zhang, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing efficiency methods for Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generate excessively long rationales without commensurate accuracy gains. |
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