Efficient Language Model Reasoning

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Overview

This field asks how language models can solve tasks such as math, coding, science questions, and multi-hop retrieval without spending unnecessary computation. Common approaches compress or prune chain-of-thought, stop generation when answers stabilize, and adapt reasoning budgets to task difficulty; others use reinforcement learning, distillation, search, parallel sampling, or smaller-model routing. Newer work also explores latent reasoning and memory or KV-cache management to reduce the cost of generating and retaining explicit thoughts. The central tension is that extra reasoning can help on difficult problems but may waste resources, introduce errors, or even hurt accuracy, so methods are judged by both quality and cost on benchmarks such as GSM8K, MATH, AIME, and GPQA.

Latest papers

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373 papers89 papers in the last four weeks, up 218% on the four weeks before. 0.5% of all new papers.

  1. TRiMS: Real-Time Tracking of Minimal Sufficient Length for Efficient Reasoning via RL

    Mar 18, 2026Tingcheng Bian, Jinchang Luo, Mingquan Cheng +5Efficient Language Model ReasoningCoT Compression

    Baidu Inc. · Shenzhen University · Harbin Institute of Technology

  2. OmniVLN: Omnidirectional 3D Perception and Token-Efficient LLM Reasoning for Visual-Language Navigation across Air and Ground Platforms

    Mar 18, 2026Zhongyuang Liu, Min He, Shaonan Yu +5Vision-Language NavigationRobot Navigation

    CertaintyX. · the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798. · the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA. +1

  3. InfoDensity: Rewarding Information-Dense Traces for Efficient Reasoning

    Mar 18, 2026Chengwei Wei, Jung-jae Kim, Longyin Zhang +2Efficient Language Model ReasoningRL for Language Model Reasoning

    Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A*STAR, Singapore · Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR), A*STAR, Singapore

  4. Efficient Reasoning on the Edge

    Mar 17, 2026Yelysei Bondarenko, Thomas Hehn, Rob Hesselink +15Efficient Language Model ReasoningOn-Device Language Model Inference

    Qualcomm AI Research is an initiative of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

  5. Thinking in Latents: Adaptive Anchor Refinement for Implicit Reasoning in LLMs

    Mar 16, 2026Disha Sheshanarayana, Rajat Subhra Pal, Manjira Sinha +1Efficient Language Model ReasoningImplicit Reasoning in Language Models

    Manipal University Jaipur · TCS Research

  6. Mitigating Overthinking in Large Reasoning Language Models via Reasoning Path Deviation Monitoring

    Mar 15, 2026Weixin Guan, Liang Li, Jiapeng Liu +6Overthinking in Language ModelsEfficient Language Model Reasoning

    Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · School of Cyberspace Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, Jiangxi, China +1

  7. Domain-Specialized Tree of Thought through Plug-and-Play Predictors

    Mar 14, 2026Xuanqi Gao, Haoyu Wang, Jun Sun +2LLM ReasoningTree of Thoughts

    Xi’an Jiaotong University, China · Singapore Management University, Singapore · University of Massachusetts at Amherst, United States

  8. TDA-RC: Task-Driven Alignment for Knowledge-Based Reasoning Chains in Large Language Models

    Mar 13, 2026Jiaquan Zhang, Qigan Sun, Chaoning Zhang +11Efficient Language Model ReasoningLLM Reasoning

    School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China · School of Computing, Kyung Hee University, Yongin-si, South Korea · School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China +3

  9. Compile to Compress: Boosting Formal Theorem Provers by Compiler Outputs

    Mar 13, 2026Guchan Li, Rui Tian, Hongning WangAutomated Theorem ProvingEfficient Language Model Reasoning

    Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

  10. Efficient Reasoning with Balanced Thinking

    Mar 12, 2026Yulin Li, Tengyao Tu, Li Ding +5Efficient Language Model ReasoningLarge Reasoning Models

    Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) · Zhongguancun Academy · Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab +3

  11. LongFlow: Efficient KV Cache Compression for Reasoning Models

    Mar 12, 2026Yi Su, Zhenxu Tian, Dan Qiao +3KV-Cache CompressionLLM Inference Acceleration

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, China · ByteDance

  12. Fuel Gauge: Estimating Chain-of-Thought Length Ahead of Time in Large Multimodal Models

    Mar 11, 2026Yuedong Yang, Xiwen Wei, Mustafa Munir +1Efficient Language Model ReasoningMultimodal CoT Reasoning

    Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin

  13. Think Twice Before You Write -- an Entropy-based Decoding Strategy to Enhance LLM Reasoning

    Mar 10, 2026Jiashu He, Meizhu Liu, Olaitan P Olaleye +9Language Model DecodingEfficient Language Model Reasoning

    Oracle AI Science · University of Pennsylvania

  14. Learning When to Sample: Confidence-Aware Selective Sampling for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

    Mar 9, 2026Juming Xiong, Kevin Guo, Congning Ni +7CoT ReasoningEfficient Language Model Reasoning

    1Vanderbilt University · 2Vanderbilt University Medical Center · 3Intuit AI Research

  15. Reasoning as Compression: Unifying Budget Forcing via the Conditional Information Bottleneck

    Mar 9, 2026Fabio Valerio Massoli, Andrey Kuzmin, Arash BehboodiEfficient Language Model ReasoningCoT Compression

    Qualcomm AI Research

  16. Not All Queries Need Deep Thought: CoFiCot for Adaptive Coarse-to-fine Stateful Refinement

    Mar 9, 2026Dongxu Zhang, Hongqiang Lin, Yiding Sun +4LLM Self-RefinementEfficient Language Model Reasoning

    Xi’an Jiaotong University · Zhejiang University · The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen) +1

  17. SmartThinker: Progressive Chain-of-Thought Length Calibration for Efficient Large Language Model Reasoning

    Mar 9, 2026Chenzhi Hu, Qinzhe Hu, Yuhang Xu +6Efficient Language Model ReasoningLarge Reasoning Models

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Beihang University

  18. Ares: Adaptive Reasoning Effort Selection for Efficient LLM Agents

    Mar 9, 2026Jingbo Yang, Bairu Hou, Wei Wei +2Efficient Language Model ReasoningLLM Inference Efficiency

    Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara · Center for Advanced AI, Accenture

  19. Reject, Resample, Repeat: Understanding Parallel Reasoning in Language Model Inference

    Mar 9, 2026Noah Golowich, Fan Chen, Dhruv Rohatgi +4Parallel Reasoning in Language ModelsLLM Inference

    Microsoft Research · MIT · NYU

  20. SCA: Segment-Wise CoT Compression with Answer Alignment

    Mar 8, 2026Ye Tian, Hongyu LinCoT CompressionEfficient Language Model Reasoning

  21. Re2\textbf{Re}^{2}: Unlocking LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning with Re-solving

    Mar 7, 2026Pinzheng Wang, Shuli Xu, Juntao Li +4RL for Language Model ReasoningReinforcement Learning

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University · Department of Foundation Model, 2012 Labs, Huawei · College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University

  22. AutoTool: Automatic Scaling of Tool-Use Capabilities in RL via Decoupled Entropy Constraints

    Mar 7, 2026Yirong Zeng, Xiao Ding, Yufei Liu +9RL for Tool UseEfficient Language Model Reasoning

    Harbin Institute of Technology, SCIR Lib · Peking University · Huawei Technologies Ltd.

  23. Improving reasoning at inference time via uncertainty minimisation

    Mar 7, 2026Nicolas Legrand, Kenneth Enevoldsen, Márton Kardos +1Efficient Language Model ReasoningInference-Time Scaling

    Center for Humanities Computing Aarhus University, Denmark

  24. CoTJudger: A Graph-Driven Framework for Automatic Evaluation of Chain-of-Thought Efficiency and Redundancy in LRMs

    Mar 7, 2026Siyi Li, Jiajun Shi, Shiwen Ni +9LLM EvaluationEfficient Language Model Reasoning

    University of Science and Technology of China · Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, CAS · ByteDance SEED +6

  25. SPOT: Span-level Pause-of-Thought for Efficient and Interpretable Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models

    Mar 6, 2026Yunlong Chu, Minglai Shao, Yuhang Liu +4Efficient Language Model ReasoningCoT Compression

    School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China · Independent Contributor, CA, USA · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China

  26. RouteGoT: Node-Adaptive Routing for Cost-Efficient Graph of Thoughts Reasoning

    Mar 6, 2026Yuhang Liu, Ruijie Wang, Yunlong Chu +4LLM Reasoning with GraphsEfficient Language Model Reasoning

    School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China · Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

  27. CRISP: Compressed Reasoning via Iterative Self-Policy Distillation

    Mar 5, 2026Hejian Sang, Yuanda Xu, Zhengze Zhou +3CoT DistillationEfficient Language Model Reasoning

  28. ∇\nabla-Reasoner: LLM Reasoning via Test-Time Gradient Descent in Latent Space

    Mar 5, 2026Peihao Wang, Ruisi Cai, Zhen Wang +4LLM ReasoningTest-Time Optimization

    The University of Texas at Austin · UC San Diego · TTIC +1

  29. Beyond Test-Time Compute Strategies: Advocating Energy-per-Token in LLM Inference

    Mar 4, 2026Patrick Wilhelm, Thorsten Wittkopp, Odej KaoEnergy-Aware LLM InferenceLLM Inference Efficiency

    BIFOLD, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

  30. Confidence-Calibrated Small-Large Language Model Collaboration for Cost-Efficient Reasoning

    Mar 4, 2026Chuang Zhang, Zizhen Zhu, Yihao Wei +5Language Model CascadingEfficient Language Model Reasoning

    Amazon Web Services · Tsinghua University