← 研踪 PaperTrailACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.1256 · 记录 #1
Stop When Enough: Adaptive Early-Stopping for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
来源日期（仅到月份） 2026-07
来源记录日期 2026-07
雷达观测 2026-11-01 21:54
摘要
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has driven recent gains of large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks by externalizing intermediate steps. However, excessive or redundant reasoning — so-called overthinking — can increase inference costs and lead LLMs toward incorrect conclusions. In this paper, we present \textbf{REFRAIN} (\underline{REF}lective-\underline{R}edundancy for \underline{A}daptive \underline{IN}ference), a training-free framework that adaptively determines when to stop reasoning to mitigate overthinking. REFRAIN integrates a two-stage stop discriminator to identify reflective yet redundant reasoning and a sliding-window Upper Confidence Bound (SW-UCB) multi-armed bandit controller to dynamically adjust stopping thresholds according to problem difficulty without supervision or fine-tuning. Across four representative benchmarks and two model families, REFRAIN reduces token usage by 20-55% while maintaining or improving accuracy compared to standard CoT prompting. Extensive ablation and robustness analyses demonstrate its stability across models, scorers, and prompt variations. In summary, our findings highlight when-to-stop as a new and practical axis of test-time scaling — enabling models to reason not just more, but just enough.
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记录 #1 · 2026-07 · 最新观测版本
Stop When Enough: Adaptive Early-Stopping for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has driven recent gains of large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks by externalizing intermediate steps. However, excessive or redundant reasoning — so-called overthinking — can increase inference costs and lead LLMs toward incorrect conclusions. In this paper, we present \textbf{REFRAIN} (\underline{REF}lective-\underline{R}edundancy for \underline{A}daptive \underline{IN}ference), a training-free framework that adaptively determines when to stop reasoning to mitigate overthinking. REFRAIN integrates a two-stage stop discriminator to identify reflective yet redundant reasoning and a sliding-window Upper Confidence Bound (SW-UCB) multi-armed bandit controller to dynamically adjust stopping thresholds according to problem difficulty without supervision or fine-tuning. Across four representative benchmarks and two model families, REFRAIN reduces token usage by 20-55% while maintaining or improving accuracy compared to standard CoT prompting. Extensive ablation and robustness analyses demonstrate its stability across models, scorers, and prompt variations. In summary, our findings highlight when-to-stop as a new and practical axis of test-time scaling — enabling models to reason not just more, but just enough.
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