SAGE: Your Reasoning Model Knows When to Stop Thinking — You Just Won't Let It
Reasoning models generate long chains of thought to arrive at answers. But what if over half of those “thoughts” are useless noise, and the model has known the answer for a while — it just doesn’t know it can stop? The paper “Does Your Reasoning Model Implicitly Know When to Stop Thinking?” discovers that this is exactly the case, and proposes SAGE — a method that cuts token usage by 40-50% while maintaining or improving accuracy. ...