OS-Pruner: Pruning Chains-of-Thought of Reasoning Models via Optimal Stopping
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, these models often exhibit "computational overthinking," generating redundant reasoning steps that increase latency and cost without improving accuracy. Recent studies suggest that CoT trajectories can be significantly pruned, yet existing methods often rely on forcing a static thinking budget, heuristic filtering, sub-optimal early exit via classification, or expensive re-training. In this paper, we introduce OS-Pruner, a lightweight plug-in framework that formulates chain-of-thought pruning as an optimal stopping problem. Given a reasoning prefix, O...
| Authors | Mohammed Ehab, Aymane El Gadarri, Vivek F. Farias et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 13 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 July 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.