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

CardsList

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

  1. Think, But Don't Overthink: Reproducing Recursive Language Models

    Mar 3, 2026Daren WangRecursive Language ModelsOverthinking in Language Models

    The Chinese University of Hong Kong

  2. Recursive Think-Answer Process for LLMs and VLMs

    Mar 2, 2026Byung-Kwan Lee, Youngchae Chee, Yong Man RoEfficient Language Model ReasoningLLM Self-Refinement

    KAIST

  3. One-Token Verification for Reasoning Correctness Estimation

    Mar 1, 2026Zhan Zhuang, Xiequn Wang, Zebin Chen +4Reasoning VerificationLLM Reasoning

    Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China · City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR · Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

  4. FastCode: Fast and Cost-Efficient Code Understanding and Reasoning

    Mar 1, 2026Zhonghang Li, Zongwei Li, Yuxuan Chen +5Efficient Language Model ReasoningSoftware Engineering

    The University of Hong Kong · Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab

  5. Draft-Thinking: Learning Efficient Reasoning in Long Chain-of-Thought LLMs

    Feb 28, 2026Jie Cao, Tianwei Lin, Juekai Lin +7Efficient Language Model ReasoningCoT Reasoning

    Zhejiang University · Tencent

  6. Stepwise Penalization for Length-Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

    Feb 27, 2026Xintong Li, Sha Li, Rongmei Lin +10Efficient Language Model ReasoningRL for Language Model Reasoning

    University of California, San Diego · Amazon

  7. Task Complexity Matters: An Empirical Study of Reasoning in LLMs for Sentiment Analysis

    Feb 27, 2026Donghao Huang, Zhaoxia WangEfficient Language Model ReasoningLLM Evaluation

    School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University, 80 Stamford Rd, Singapore 178902, Singapore · Research and Development, Mastercard, 4250 Fairfax Dr, Arlington, VA 22203, USA

  8. Learning from Partial Chain-of-Thought via Truncated-Reasoning Self-Distillation

    Feb 27, 2026Gianluigi Silvestri, Edoardo CetinEfficient Language Model ReasoningCoT Distillation

    Radboud University · Sakana AI

  9. ODAR: Principled Adaptive Routing for LLM Reasoning via Active Inference

    Feb 27, 2026Siyuan Ma, Bo Gao, Xiaojun Jia +6Efficient Language Model ReasoningLLM Routing

    Nanyang Technological University · Carnegie Mellon University · Northeast University (Qinhuangdao Campus) +4

  10. Compress the Easy, Explore the Hard: Difficulty-Aware Entropy Regularization for Efficient LLM Reasoning

    Feb 26, 2026Qin-Wen Luo, Sheng Ren, Xiang Chen +4Efficient Language Model ReasoningCoT Compression

    Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China · College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China · Didichuxing Co. Ltd, Beijing, China

  11. Stable Adaptive Thinking via Advantage Shaping and Length-Aware Gradient Regulation

    Feb 26, 2026Zihang Xu, Haozhi Xie, Ziqi Miao +3Overthinking in Language ModelsEfficient Language Model Reasoning

    Renmin University of China

  12. Distilling Metacognitive Behaviors through Agentic Editing

    Feb 26, 2026Ik-hwan Kim, Hyeongrok Han, Mingi Jung +5Efficient Language Model ReasoningMetacognition in Language Models

    Dept. of ECE, Seoul Nat’l Univ., Seoul, Korea · AI Center, Samsung Elec., Korea · AIIS, ASRI, INMC, ISRC, Interdisc. Prog. in AI, Seoul Nat’l Univ., Seoul, Korea

  13. D-COT: Disciplined Chain-of-Thought Learning for Efficient Reasoning in Small Language Models

    Feb 25, 2026Shunsuke UbukataEfficient Language Model ReasoningCoT Distillation

    Toyo University

  14. Prompt-Level Distillation: A Non-Parametric Alternative to Model Fine-Tuning for Efficient Reasoning

    Feb 24, 2026Sanket Badhe, Deep ShahEfficient Language Model ReasoningLanguage Model Distillation

    Google Mountain View, California, USA

  15. The Art of Efficient Reasoning: Data, Reward, and Optimization

    Feb 24, 2026Taiqiang Wu, Zenan Xu, Bo Zhou +1Efficient Language Model ReasoningRL for Language Model Reasoning

    The University of Hong Kong · LLM Department, Tencent

  16. To Reason or Not to: Selective Chain-of-Thought in Medical Question Answering

    Feb 23, 2026Zaifu Zhan, Min Zeng, Shuang Zhou +6CoT ReasoningEfficient Language Model Reasoning

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota, 200 Union St SE, 55455, Minneapolis, MN, United States · Division of Computational Health Sciences, Department of Surgery, University of Minnesota, 420 Delaware St SE, 55455, Minneapolis, MN, United States · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota, 200 Union St SE, 55455, Minneapolis, MN, United States +1

  17. Ada-RS: Adaptive Rejection Sampling for Selective Thinking

    Feb 23, 2026Yirou Ge, Yixi Li, Alec Chiu +8Efficient Language Model ReasoningRL for Language Model Reasoning

    PayPal AI

  18. Classroom Final Exam: An Instructor-Tested Reasoning Benchmark

    Feb 23, 2026Chongyang Gao, Diji Yang, Shuyan Zhou +4MLLM ReasoningLLM Evaluation

    Northwestern University · UC Santa Cruz · Duke University +3

  19. IAPO: Information-Aware Policy Optimization for Token-Efficient Reasoning

    Feb 22, 2026Yinhan He, Yaochen Zhu, Mingjia Shi +5Efficient Language Model ReasoningLanguage Model Post-Training

    University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA · LinkedIn Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, USA

  20. Thinking by Subtraction: Confidence-Driven Contrastive Decoding for LLM Reasoning

    Feb 20, 2026Lexiang Tang, Weihao Gao, Bingchen Zhao +4Efficient Language Model ReasoningLLM Reliability

    Peking University, Beijing, China · University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.

  21. WS-GRPO: Weakly-Supervised Group-Relative Policy Optimization for Rollout-Efficient Reasoning

    Feb 19, 2026Gagan Mundada, Zihan Huang, Rohan Surana +8Efficient Language Model ReasoningRL for Language Model Reasoning

    University of California, San Diego · University of Toronto · 3Adobe Research +2

  22. Training Large Reasoning Models Efficiently via Progressive Thought Encoding

    Feb 18, 2026Zeliang Zhang, Xiaodong Liu, Hao Cheng +3Efficient Language Model ReasoningLLM Reasoning

    University of Rochester · Microsoft Research

  23. Escaping the Cognitive Well: Efficient Competition Math with Off-the-Shelf Models

    Feb 18, 2026Xingyu Dang, Rohit Agarwal, Rodrigo Porto +3Language Model Self-VerificationMathematical Reasoning

    Princeton University · Princeton Language and Intelligence

  24. BFS-PO: Best-First Search for Large Reasoning Models

    Feb 16, 2026Fiorenzo Parascandolo, Wenhui Tan, Enver Sangineto +2Efficient Language Model ReasoningRL for Language Model Reasoning

    Department of Engineering, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. · Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China.

  25. Precedent-Informed Reasoning: Mitigating Overthinking in Large Reasoning Models via Test-Time Precedent Learning

    Feb 16, 2026Qianyue Wang, Jinwu Hu, Huanxiang Lin +5Efficient Language Model ReasoningOverthinking in Language Models

    South China University of Technology · Pazhou Laboratory · DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group

  26. Broken Chains: The Cost of Incomplete Reasoning in LLMs

    Feb 16, 2026Ian Su, Gaurav Purushothaman, Jey Narayan +5LLM ReasoningCoT Reasoning

  27. Think Deep, Not Just Long: Measuring LLM Reasoning Effort via Deep-Thinking Tokens

    Feb 13, 2026Wei-Lin Chen, Liqian Peng, Tian Tan +5LLM Inference EfficiencyInference-Time Scaling

    University of Virginia · Google

  28. ConPress: Learning Efficient Reasoning from Multi-Question Contextual Pressure

    Feb 1, 2026Jie Deng, Shining Liang, Jun Li +2Efficient Language Model ReasoningLLM Inference Acceleration

    University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · 2Microsoft, Beijing, China · 3Tongji University, Shanghai, China

  29. Latent Chain-of-Thought as Planning: Decoupling Reasoning from Verbalization

    Jan 29, 2026Jiecong Wang, Hao Peng, Zhanyi Wang +2LLM PlanningEfficient Language Model Reasoning

    Beihang University · Didi Chuxing

  30. Sandwich Reasoning: An Answer-Reasoning-Answer Approach for Low-Latency Query Correction

    Jan 7, 2026Chen Zhang, Kepu Zhang, Jiatong Zhang +2Efficient Language Model ReasoningQuery Reformulation

    Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China