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#1 Multi-objective Evolutionary Merging Enables Efficient Reasoning Models [PDF1] [Copy] [Kimi2] [REL]

Authors: Mario Iacobelli, Adrian Robert Minut, Tommaso Mencattini, Donato Crisostomi, Andrea Santilli, Iacopo Masi, Emanuele Rodolà

Reasoning models achieve strong performance on complex problems by leveraging long chains of thought, but this deliberate reasoning incurs substantial inference-time cost. The Long-to-Short (L2S) reasoning problem seeks to preserve accuracy while reducing generated tokens. Yet, current training-free model merging approaches rely on brittle, fixed-hyperparameter arithmetic methods that force suboptimal compromises. We introduce \textbf{Evo-L2S}, a multi-objective evolutionary model merging framework that explicitly optimizes accuracy and output length to recover a Pareto front of merged models. To make this search computationally tractable, we propose an entropy-based subset sampling technique that substantially reduces fitness-estimation overhead. Across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, Evo-L2S reduces reasoning length by over 50\% at the 1.5B and 7B scales while preserving or improving problem-solving accuracy; at 14B, the steeper Pareto front reveals that attainable compression depends on the intrinsic compressibility of the reasoning model. Overall, Evo-L2S shows that reasoning models can be made substantially more concise while preserving strong problem-solving performance.

Subject: COLM.2026