Prefix Sliding for efficient test-time scaling
Test-time scaling uses extra test-time compute to improve performance, such as letting language models reason longer when solving a problem. As models keep the entire reasoning trace in memory via full attention, hard tasks that need long thinking can be prohibitively expensive. However, we find most intermediate reasoning tokens lose importance as the model continues reasoning. This calls into question whether retaining them is worth the cost. Based on this insight, we propose Prefix Sliding, which discards tokens during reasoning that are not part of the prefix or the window of the last few thousand tokens. The prefix has key instructions and tools available to the model, while the most...
| Authors | Niklas Muennighoff, Zhengyang Wang, Zeyi Chen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 26 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 August 2026 |
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