Humans Disengage, Reasoning Models Persist: Separating Difficulty Registration from Deliberation Allocation

arXiv:2606.26502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) take longer on harder problems, just as humans do. This surface similarity hides an opposite pattern within items. When an LRM gets a problem wrong, it spends more tokens than when it gets the same problem right; humans do the reverse, spending less time on the trials they get wrong. We separate two levels of deliberation: how response time tracks difficulty across items (registration), and, with item identity held fixed, whether an agent spends more on its own failures or successes (allocation). On a public matched

Source: arXiv cs.AI — read the full report at the original publisher.

This is a curated wire item. The Continuum Brief does not republish full third-party articles; this entry links to the original source.