Do LLMs Overthink Basic Math Reasoning? Benchmarking the Accuracy-Efficiency Tradeoff in Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance on complex benchmarks yet sometimes fail on basic math reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the efficiency of reasoning in large language models . they formalize the accuracy-verbosity tradeoff and introduce the overthinking score . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on complex benchmarks but fails on basic math reasoning . the proposed model generates 18 more tokens while achieving lower accuracy . |
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