Wait, We Don't Need to "Wait"! Removing Thinking Tokens Improves Reasoning Efficiency

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08343v2
• Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2025 14:43:36 GMT
• Title: Wait, We Don't Need to "Wait"! Removing Thinking Tokens Improves Reasoning Efficiency
• Authors: Chenlong Wang, Yuanning Feng, Dongping Chen, Zhaoyang Chu, Ranjay Krishna, Tianyi Zhou,
• Abstract summary: Explicit self-reflection, signaled by tokens such as "Wait" and "Hmm", is necessary for advanced reasoning.<n>We propose NoWait, a simple yet effective approach that disables explicit self-reflection by suppressing these tokens during inference.
• Score: 24.56015832583054
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Recent advances in large reasoning models have enabled complex, step-by-step reasoning but often introduce significant overthinking, resulting in verbose and redundant outputs that hinder efficiency. In this study, we examine whether explicit self-reflection, signaled by tokens such as "Wait" and "Hmm", is necessary for advanced reasoning. We propose NoWait, a simple yet effective approach that disables explicit self-reflection by suppressing these tokens during inference. Extensive experiments on ten benchmarks across textual, visual, and video reasoning tasks show that NoWait reduces chain-of-thought trajectory length by up to 27%-51% in five R1-style model series, without compromising model utility. NoWait thus offers a plug-and-play solution for efficient and utility-preserving multimodal reasoning.

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