Stop Spinning Wheels: Mitigating LLM Overthinking via Mining Patterns for Early Reasoning Exit

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17627v1
• Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2025 03:17:17 GMT
• Title: Stop Spinning Wheels: Mitigating LLM Overthinking via Mining Patterns for Early Reasoning Exit
• Authors: Zihao Wei, Liang Pang, Jiahao Liu, Jingcheng Deng, Shicheng Xu, Zenghao Duan, Jingang Wang, Fei Sun, Xunliang Cai, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng,
• Abstract summary: Overthinking can degrade overall performance of large language models.<n>We categorize reasoning into three stages: insufficient exploration stage, compensatory reasoning stage, and reasoning convergence stage.<n>We develop a lightweight thresholding strategy based on rules to improve reasoning accuracy.
• Score: 114.83867400179354
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) enhance complex reasoning tasks by scaling the individual thinking process. However, prior work shows that overthinking can degrade overall performance. Motivated by observed patterns in thinking length and content length, we categorize reasoning into three stages: insufficient exploration stage, compensatory reasoning stage, and reasoning convergence stage. Typically, LLMs produce correct answers in the compensatory reasoning stage, whereas reasoning convergence often triggers overthinking, causing increased resource usage or even infinite loops. Therefore, mitigating overthinking hinges on detecting the end of the compensatory reasoning stage, defined as the Reasoning Completion Point (RCP). RCP typically appears at the end of the first complete reasoning cycle and can be identified by querying the LLM sentence by sentence or monitoring the probability of an end-of-thinking token (e.g., \texttt{</think>}), though these methods lack an efficient and precise balance. To improve this, we mine more sensitive and consistent RCP patterns and develop a lightweight thresholding strategy based on heuristic rules. Experimental evaluations on benchmarks (AIME24, AIME25, GPQA-D) demonstrate that the proposed method reduces token consumption while preserving or enhancing reasoning accuracy.

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