Towards Efficient Large Language Reasoning Models via Extreme-Ratio Chain-of-Thought Compression

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08324v1
• Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2026 06:57:15 GMT
• Title: Towards Efficient Large Language Reasoning Models via Extreme-Ratio Chain-of-Thought Compression
• Authors: Yuntian Tang, Bohan Jia, Wenxuan Huang, Lianyue Zhang, Jiao Xie, Wenxi Li, Wei Li, Jie Hu, Xinghao Chen, Rongrong Ji, Shaohui Lin,
• Abstract summary: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning successfully enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs)<n>Existing CoT compression methods often suffer from a critical loss of logical fidelity at high compression ratios.<n>We propose a novel EXTreme-RAtio Chain-of-Thought Compression framework, termed Extra-CoT, which aggressively reduces the token budget while preserving answer accuracy.
• Score: 55.63153956934198
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning successfully enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it incurs substantial computational overhead for inference. Existing CoT compression methods often suffer from a critical loss of logical fidelity at high compression ratios, resulting in significant performance degradation. To achieve high-fidelity, fast reasoning, we propose a novel EXTreme-RAtio Chain-of-Thought Compression framework, termed Extra-CoT, which aggressively reduces the token budget while preserving answer accuracy. To generate reliable, high-fidelity supervision, we first train a dedicated semantically-preserved compressor on mathematical CoT data with fine-grained annotations. An LLM is then fine-tuned on these compressed pairs via a mixed-ratio supervised fine-tuning (SFT), teaching it to follow a spectrum of compression budgets and providing a stable initialization for reinforcement learning (RL). We further propose Constrained and Hierarchical Ratio Policy Optimization (CHRPO) to explicitly incentivize question-solving ability under lower budgets by a hierarchical reward. Experiments on three mathematical reasoning benchmarks show the superiority of Extra-CoT. For example, on MATH-500 using Qwen3-1.7B, Extra-CoT achieves over 73\% token reduction with an accuracy improvement of 0.6\%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

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