In plain words: Telling a language model how many words it may spend on thinking makes its step-by-step reasoning much shorter; this system sets that limit per problem based on difficulty. Compared with ordinary step-by-step reasoning, it cuts thinking cost while losing only a little accuracy.
Abstract
Reasoning is critical for large language models (LLMs) to excel in a wide range of tasks. While methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and enhance LLM performance by decomposing problems into intermediate steps, they also incur significant overhead in token usage, leading to increased costs. We find that the reasoning process of current LLMs is unnecessarily lengthy and it can be compressed by including a reasonable token budget in the prompt, but the choice of token budget plays a crucial role in the actual compression effectiveness. We then propose a token-budget-aware LLM reasoning framework that dynamically adjusts the number of reasoning tokens based on the reasoning complexity of each problem. Experiments show that our method effectively reduces token costs in CoT reasoning with only a slight performance reduction, offering a practical solution to balance efficiency and accuracy in LLM reasoning. Code: https://github.com/GeniusHTX/TALE
Tingxu Han, Zhenting Wang, Chunrong Fang, Shiyu Zhao, Shiqing Ma, Zhenyu Chen
arXiv:2412.18547 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Dec 24, 2024 · updated Jun 2, 2025
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