arXiv:2601.18383v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at solving complex problems by explicitly generating a reasoning trace before deriving the final answer. However, these extended generations incur substantial memory footprint and computational overhead, bottlenecking LRMs' efficiency. This work uses attention maps to analyze the influence of reasoning traces and uncover an interesting phenomenon: only some decision-critical tokens in a reasoning trace steer the model toward the final answer, while the remaining tokens contribute negligibly. Building
Source: arXiv cs.CL — read the full report at the original publisher.
