Your Models Have Thought Enough: Training Large Reasoning Models to Stop Overthinking

Abstract

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved impressive performance on challenging tasks, yet their deep reasoning often incurs substantial computational costs. To achieve efficient reasoning, existing reinforcement learning methods still struggle to construct short reasoning path during the rollout stage, limiting effective learning. Inspired by Evidence Accumulation Models, we find that LRMs have accumulated sufficient information early in reasoning, making further reasoning steps redundant. Based on this insight, we propose Just-Enough Thinking (JET), which trains models to proactively terminate unnecessary reasoning. JET performs trajectory truncation during rollout to expose the model to short, distributionally consistent reasoning paths. Besides, it uses a quality-controlled length reward to better encourage concise reasoning while maintaining correctness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that JET significantly improves reasoning efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. In particular, JET delivers a 4.6% accuracy improvement while reducing the output length by 46.3% on the Olympiad benchmark using DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B. Our code is available in the GitHub.

Cite

Text

Han et al. "Your Models Have Thought Enough: Training Large Reasoning Models to Stop Overthinking." International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.

Markdown

[Han et al. "Your Models Have Thought Enough: Training Large Reasoning Models to Stop Overthinking." International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.](https://mlanthology.org/iclr/2026/han2026iclr-your/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{han2026iclr-your,
  title     = {{Your Models Have Thought Enough: Training Large Reasoning Models to Stop Overthinking}},
  author    = {Han, Jinyi and Huang, Ying and Liao, Ying and Zhao, Haiquan and Jiang, Zishang and Wang, Xinyi and Lu, Xikun and Zhou, Guanghao and Jiang, Sihang and Liang, Jiaqing and Zhou, Weikang and Sun, Zeye and Yu, Fei and Xiao, Yanghua},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/iclr/2026/han2026iclr-your/}
}