Does the Linguistic Register of Thinking Matter? Wenyan as a Compact Reasoning Register for Chinese LLMs
Visible reasoning traces of Chinese reasoning-oriented LLMs are typically written in modern vernacular Chinese, which may be verbose under limited decoding budgets. We ask whether the linguistic register of reasoning can be used to improve efficiency. We propose Wenyan Thinking, which emits intermediate reasoning in Classical Chinese (wenyanwen) while retaining a short direct-answer output. Starting from modern-Chinese reasoning traces, we rewrite only the reasoning field into wenyan and fine-tune Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507 on the rewritten supervision. To distinguish register shift from generic compression, we construct a compact modern-Chinese control using the same source data, teacher fam...
| Authors | Minghan Li, Guodong Zhou |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 14 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 October 2026 |
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