Large reasoning models (LRMs) often suffer from overthinking, continuing with redundant verification and repeated attempts even after reaching a correct solution. This wastes computation and can overturn an initially correct answer. We show that the transition from productive to redundant reasoning is decodable from late-layer hidden states. These representations separate the two phases around first-correct-solution boundaries beyond what position and lexical controls explain, and distinguish correct from incorrect solution endings. Building on this finding, we propose ROM (Real-time Overthinking Mitigation), which uses a lightweight streaming detector (0.07--0.25\% of backbone parameters) to monitor a frozen LRM and intervene at well-formed reasoning boundaries without answer extraction or probe decoding. Counterfactual Self-Correction (CSC) augments detector training with wrong$\rightarrow$correct trajectories to preserve useful self-correction. Heads are trained separately for each backbone using shared MATH500 supervision and transfer zero-shot to four unseen benchmarks. Evaluated against ten baselines across five backbones from three families and five benchmarks, ROM$_{\text{CSC}}$ reduces response length by 28--77\% (45\% on average), with significant reductions in all 25 settings and accuracy matching or exceeding vanilla decoding in 22. Measurements on two backbones further show 20--70\% lower end-to-end latency with less than 0.5\% detector overhead per decoding step. Code is available at https://github.com/SaFo-Lab/ROM.
Weidong Tang, Jierui Li Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University and Xidian University, Yueling Hou Xi'an University of Electronic Science and Technology, Zihan Mei, Can Zhang, Xinyan Wan, Zhiyuan Liang University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Pengfei Zhou 等 10 位作者
True general intelligence requires not only a model of the physical world but also a social world model: the capacity to infer how individual mental states interact and crystallize into group-level outcomes. Despite notable progress in individual-level Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning, existing multimodal large language models systematically fail at this: collective behavior emerges non-linearly from social tensions, conformity dynamics, and structural constraints, and cannot be recovered by summing individual intentions. We present GroupToM-Bench, the first multimodal benchmark for group-level ToM, built around a causal chain spanning micro-level BDI states (belief, desire, intention), meso-level group tension and structural constraints, and macro-level outcome prediction and mechanistic attribution. To probe this full arc, we develop a seven-level cognitive audit framework. Experiments reveal that frontier models perform significantly below human levels, exposing fundamental blind spots in modeling social structures and nonlinear collective behavior.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表