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Token Budget Saturation and Mechanistic Early Detection of Reasoning Non-Convergence in Chain-of-Thought Models

Research LLMs & Foundation Models

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TL;DR - Chain-of-thought models often either finish successfully or exhaust their token budget with poor results. Hidden-state probes show a modest early signal of non-convergence, potentially enabling early exits and adaptive compute allocation.

  • Converged generations achieved 90.3% AIME accuracy versus 6.6% for non-converged generations; 62.0% converged overall.
  • A linear probe on layer-20 activations at token 150 reached AUC 0.608 (±0.080, 5-fold CV).
  • Activation probes outperformed token-entropy and repetition-based behavioral baselines.
  • The sweep-level permutation result (p=0.063) did not meet conventional significance thresholds.

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Token Budget Saturation and Mechanistic Early Detection of Reasoning Non-Convergence in Chain-of-Thought Models

arXiv cs.CL Renuka Oladri, Niveda Jawahar, Abdirisak Mohamed 2026-07-23 arXiv:2607.21433
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-08-03 04:23:22.717618 UTC

TL;DR - Chain-of-thought models often either finish successfully or exhaust their token budget with poor results. Hidden-state probes show a modest early signal of non-convergence, potentially enabling early exits and adaptive compute allocation.

  • Converged generations achieved 90.3% AIME accuracy versus 6.6% for non-converged generations; 62.0% converged overall.
  • A linear probe on layer-20 activations at token 150 reached AUC 0.608 (±0.080, 5-fold CV).
  • Activation probes outperformed token-entropy and repetition-based behavioral baselines.
  • The sweep-level permutation result (p=0.063) did not meet conventional significance thresholds.
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