2025.findings-acl.1068@ACL

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#1 Verbosity-Aware Rationale Reduction: Sentence-Level Rationale Reduction for Efficient and Effective Reasoning [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Joonwon Jang, Jaehee Kim, Wonbin Kweon, Seonghyeon Lee, Hwanjo Yu

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on generating extensive intermediate reasoning units (e.g., tokens, sentences) to enhance final answer quality across a wide range of complex tasks. While this approach has proven effective, it inevitably increases substantial inference costs. Previous methods adopting token-level reduction without clear criteria result in poor performance compared to models trained with complete rationale. To address this challenge, we propose a novel sentence-level rationale reduction framework leveraging likelihood-based criteria, *verbosity*, to identify and remove redundant reasoning sentences. Unlike previous approaches, our method leverages *verbosity* to selectively remove redundant reasoning sentences while preserving reasoning capabilities. Our experimental results across various reasoning tasks demonstrate that our method improves performance by an average of 7.71% while reducing token generation by 19.87% compared to model trained with complete reasoning paths.

Subject: ACL.2025 - Findings