In plain words: Trial-and-error training teaches the model to think longer on hard problems and skip needless steps on easy ones. Compared with always writing long chains of thought, it cut running costs sharply while keeping most of the accuracy.
Abstract · Training Language Models to Reason Efficiently
Scaling model size and training data has led to great advances in the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the diminishing returns of this approach necessitate alternative methods to improve model capabilities, particularly in tasks requiring advanced reasoning. Large reasoning models, which leverage long chain-of-thoughts, bring unprecedented breakthroughs in problem-solving capabilities but at a substantial deployment cost associated to longer generations. Reducing inference costs is crucial for the economic feasibility, user experience, and environmental sustainability of these models. In this work, we propose to train large reasoning models to reason efficiently. More precisely, we use reinforcement learning (RL) to train reasoning models to dynamically allocate inference-time compute based on task complexity. Our method incentivizes models to minimize unnecessary computational overhead while maintaining accuracy, thereby achieving substantial efficiency gains. It enables the derivation of a family of reasoning models with varying efficiency levels, controlled via a single hyperparameter. Experiments on two open-weight large reasoning models demonstrate significant reductions in inference cost while preserving most of the accuracy.
Daman Arora, Andrea Zanette
arXiv:2502.04463 · cs.LG, cs.CL · submitted Feb 6, 2025 · updated Nov 3, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · NeurIPS 2025