Xingyu Chen

Yue Wang, Qiuzhi Liu, Jiahao Xu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's o1 have demonstrated remarkable abilities in complex reasoning tasks by scaling test-time compute and exhibiting human-like deep thinking. However, we identify a phenomenon we term underthinking, where o1-like LLMs frequently switch between different reasoning thoughts without sufficiently exploring promising paths to reach a correct solution. This behavior leads to inadequate depth of reasoning and decreased performance, particularly on challenging mathematical problems. To systematically analyze this issue, we conduct experiments on three challenging test sets and two representative open-source o1-like models, revealing that frequent thought switching correlates with incorrect responses. We introduce a novel metric to quantify underthinking by measuring token efficiency in incorrect answers. To address underthinking, we propose a decoding strategy with thought switching penalty TIP that discourages premature transitions between thoughts, encouraging deeper exploration of each reasoning path. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach improves accuracy across challenging datasets without requiring model fine-tuning. Our findings contribute to understanding reasoning inefficiencies in o1-like LLMs and offer a practical solution to enhance their problem-solving capabilities.

Xingyu Chen, Jiahao Xu, Tian Liang et al.

The remarkable performance of models like the OpenAI o1 can be attributed to their ability to emulate human-like long-time thinking during inference. These models employ extended chain-of-thought (CoT) processes, exploring multiple strategies to enhance problem-solving capabilities. However, a critical question remains: How to intelligently and efficiently scale computational resources during testing. This paper presents the first comprehensive study on the prevalent issue of overthinking in these models, where excessive computational resources are allocated for simple problems with minimal benefit. We introduce novel efficiency metrics from both outcome and process perspectives to evaluate the rational use of computational resources by o1-like models. Using a self-training paradigm, we propose strategies to mitigate overthinking, streamlining reasoning processes without compromising accuracy. Experimental results show that our approach successfully reduces computational overhead while preserving model performance across a range of testsets with varying difficulty levels, such as GSM8K, MATH500, GPQA, and AIME.

Ziyin Zhang, Jiahao Xu, Tian Liang et al.

Conventional speculative decoding (SD) methods utilize a predefined length policy for proposing drafts, which implies the premise that the target model smoothly accepts the proposed draft tokens. However, reality deviates from this assumption: the oracle draft length varies significantly, and the fixed-length policy hardly satisfies such a requirement. Moreover, such discrepancy is further exacerbated in scenarios involving complex reasoning and long-form generation, particularly under test-time scaling for reasoning-specialized models. Through both theoretical and empirical estimation, we establish that the discrepancy between the draft and target models can be approximated by the draft model's prediction entropy: a high entropy indicates a low acceptance rate of draft tokens, and vice versa. Based on this insight, we propose SVIP: Self-Verification Length Policy for Long-Context Speculative Decoding, which is a training-free dynamic length policy for speculative decoding systems that adaptively determines the lengths of draft sequences by referring to the draft entropy. Experimental results on mainstream SD benchmarks as well as reasoning-heavy benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of SVIP, achieving up to 17% speedup on MT-Bench at 8K context compared with fixed draft lengths, and 22% speedup for QwQ in long-form reasoning.