When2Think: Learning When and How Much to Reason
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often overthink easy problems and underthink hard ones, leading to inefficient computation allocation. Existing methods regulate generated computation or select between direct answering and explicit reasoning, but do not jointly control whether}to reason and how much computation to allocate within reasoning. We call the resulting difficulty-dependent loss in accuracy under computation reduction the efficiency tax. We propose When2Think, an RLVR-based post-training framework for instance-adaptive computation allocation. Its core mechanism, Instance-level Difficulty-Aware Control (IDAC), uses cached reference statistics of success and token cost to modulate a c...
| Authors | Jaejun Shim, HyunJin Kim, Young Jin Kim et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 17 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 September 2026 |
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