Think Right: Learning to Mitigate Under-Over Thinking via Adaptive, Attentive Compression

arXiv:2510.01581v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent thinking models are capable of solving complex reasoning tasks by scaling test-time compute, but this scaling should be allocated in line with task difficulty. On one hand, short reasoning (underthinking) leads to errors on harder problems that require extended reasoning steps; but, excessively long reasoning (overthinking) can be token-inefficient by generating unnecessary steps even after reaching a correct intermediate solution. We refer to this as under-adaptivity, where the model fails to modulate its response length appropriately given problems of varying difficulty. To address under-adaptivity and strike a balance between under- and overthinking, we propose TRAAC (Think Right with Adaptive, Attentive Compression), an online post-training RL method that leverages the model's self-attention to identify key steps and prune redundant ones. TRAAC also estimates difficulty and incorporates it into training rewards, thereby learning to allocate a reasoning budget commensurate with example difficulty. Across a variety of tasks (AIME, AMC, GPQA-D, BBEH), TRAAC (Qwen3-4B) achieves an average absolute accuracy gain of 8.4% with a relative reduction in reasoning length of 36.8% compared to the base model, and a 7.9% accuracy gain paired with a 29.4% length drop compared to the best RL baseline. TRAAC generalizes well, with accuracy and efficiency gains on out-of-distribution non-math datasets like GPQA-D, BBEH, and OptimalThinkingBench. Our analysis shows that TRAAC learns to adjust its thinking budget based on difficulty and that a combination of task-difficulty calibration and attention-based compression yields gains across diverse tasks.

Abstract:Recent thinking models are capable of solving complex reasoning tasks by scaling test-time compute, but this scaling should be allocated in line with task difficulty. On one hand, short reasoning (underthinking) leads to errors on harder problems that require extended reasoning steps; but, excessively long reasoning (overthinking) can be token-inefficient by generating unnecessary steps even after reaching a correct intermediate solution. We refer to this as under-adaptivity, where the model fails to modulate its response length appropriately given problems of varying difficulty. To address under-adaptivity and strike a balance between under- and overthinking, we propose TRAAC (Think Right with Adaptive, Attentive Compression), an online post-training RL method that leverages the model's self-attention to identify key steps and prune redundant ones. TRAAC also estimates difficulty and incorporates it into training rewards, thereby learning to allocate a reasoning budget commensurate with example difficulty. Across a variety of tasks (AIME, AMC, GPQA-D, BBEH), TRAAC (Qwen3-4B) achieves an average absolute accuracy gain of 8.4% with a relative reduction in reasoning length of 36.8% compared to the base model, and a 7.9% accuracy gain paired with a 29.4% length drop compared to the best RL baseline. TRAAC generalizes well, with accuracy and efficiency gains on out-of-distribution non-math datasets like GPQA-D, BBEH, and OptimalThinkingBench. Our analysis shows that TRAAC learns to adjust its thinking budget based on difficulty and that a combination of task-difficulty calibration and attention-based compression yields gains across diverse tasks.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2510.01581 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2510.01581v2 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.01581 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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Think Right: Learning to Mitigate Under-Over Thinking via Adaptive, Attentive Compression

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