Merlin’s Whisper: Enabling Efficient Reasoning in Large Language Models via Black-box Persuasive Prompting
Heming Xia Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Cunxiao Du, Rui Li, Chak Tou Leong Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Yongqi Li Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Wenjie Li The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in tackling complex tasks through step-by-step thinking. However, this lengthy reasoning process incurs substantial computational and latency overheads, hindering the practical deployment of LRMs. This work presents a new approach to mitigating overthinking in LRMs via black-box persuasive prompting. By treating LRMs as black-box communicators, we investigate how to persuade them to generate concise responses without compromising accuracy. We introduce Whisper, an iterative refinement framework that generates high-quality persuasive prompts from diverse perspectives. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that Whisper consistently reduces token usage while preserving performance. Notably, Whisper achieves a 3\times reduction in average response length on simple GSM8K questions for the Qwen3 series and delivers an average \sim40% token reduction overall. For closed-source APIs, Whisper reduces token usage on MATH-500 by 46% for Claude-3.7 and 50% for Gemini-2.5. Further analysis reveals the broad applicability of Whisper across data domains, model scales, and families, underscoring the potential of black-box persuasive prompting as a practical strategy for enhancing LRM efficiency.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表