Are Large Reasoning Models Interruptible?
This addresses a critical issue for users relying on LRMs for long-term tasks like assistive programming, where the frozen world assumption fails, though it is incremental as it builds on existing evaluation methods.
The paper tackles the problem that Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are evaluated in static settings, which overestimates their robustness in dynamic scenarios like interruptions or changing contexts, finding that performance can drop by up to 60% when updates occur late in reasoning.
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex reasoning but are traditionally evaluated in static, "frozen world" settings: model responses are assumed to be instantaneous, and the context of a request is presumed to be immutable over the duration of the response. While generally true for short-term tasks, the "frozen world" assumption breaks down in modern reasoning tasks such as assistive programming, where models may take hours to think through problems and code may change dramatically from the time the model starts thinking to the model's final output. In this work, we challenge the frozen world assumption and evaluate LRM robustness under two realistic dynamic scenarios: interruptions, which test the quality of the model's partial outputs on a limited budget, and dynamic context, which tests model adaptation to in-flight changes. Across mathematics and programming benchmarks that require long-form reasoning, static evaluations consistently overestimate robustness: even state-of-the-art LRMs, which achieve high accuracy in static settings, can fail unpredictably when interrupted or exposed to changing context, with performance dropping by up to 60% when updates are introduced late in the reasoning process. Our analysis further reveals several novel failure modes, including reasoning leakage, where models fold the reasoning into their final answer when interrupted; panic, where under time pressure models abandon reasoning entirely and return incorrect answers; and self-doubt, where performance degrades while incorporating updated information. Project Page: http://dynamic-lm.github.io/