When Can Large Reasoning Models Save Thinking? Mechanistic Analysis of Behavioral Divergence in Reasoning

arXiv:2505.15276v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable success on complex tasks, yet their tendency to "overthink" leads to inefficiencies.

Although "save-thinking" prompts are intended to mitigate this issue, we find that LRMs still frequently enter the "Still-thinking" mode instead of the expected "No-thinking" mode, especially on difficult queries.

To analyze this behavioral divergence, we examine LRMs from three perspectives: confidence at the thinking-termination boundary, divergence in internal attention distributions, and attention allocation across prompt segments. We find that high perplexity is associated with later Still-thinking behavior, and that Still-thinking cases allocate more attention to the original question.

Based on these observations, we propose an attention intervention method to regulate this behavior. While this intervention suppresses explicit thinking, it also causes a drop in accuracy, suggesting that the suppressed reasoning behavior is often useful for correctness.

Our work provides confidence- and attention-level evidence for this behavior, highlighting the trade-off between instruction following, inference efficiency, and reasoning correctness.