Wait, We Don't Need to "Wait"! Removing Thinking Tokens Improves
  Reasoning Efficiency
Recent advances in large reasoning models have enabled complex, step-by-step
reasoning but often introduce significant overthinking, resulting in verbose
and redundant outputs that hinder efficiency. In this study, we examine whether
explicit self-reflection, signaled by tokens such as "Wait" and "Hmm", is
necessary for advanced reasoning. We propose NoWait, a simple yet effective
approach that disables explicit self-reflection by suppressing these tokens
during inference. Extensive experiments on ten benchmarks across textual,
visual, and video reasoning tasks show that NoWait reduces chain-of-thought
trajectory length by up to 27%-51% in five R1-style model series, without
compromising model utility. NoWait thus offers a plug-and-play solution for
efficient and utility-preserving multimodal reasoning.
684ae1f5dbd21a9cc27b0f3a
Chenlong Wang
684ae1f5dbd21a9cc27b0f3b
Yuanning Feng
684ae1f5dbd21a9cc27b0f3c
Dongping Chen
684ae1f5dbd21a9cc27b0f3d
Zhaoyang Chu
684ae1f5dbd21a9cc27b0f3e
Ranjay Krishna
684ae1f5dbd21a9cc27b0f3f
Tianyi Zhou
claimed_verified
2025-06-17T21:13:27.668Z
647f5af5b0e96764589f3b2a
https://cdn-avatars.huggingface.co/v1/production/uploads/noauth/VJ4cDyjp5M3V5WmI5gPIU.jpeg
Tianyi Zhou
user
zhoutianyi
Wait, We Don't Need to "Wait"! Removing Thinking Tokens Improves
  Reasoning Efficiency
Recent advances in large reasoning models have enabled complex, step-by-step
reasoning but often introduce significant overthinking, resulting in verbose
and redundant outputs that hinder efficiency. In this study, we examine whether
explicit self-reflection, signaled by tokens such as "Wait" and "Hmm", is
necessary for advanced reasoning. We propose NoWait, a simple yet effective
approach that disables explicit self-reflection by suppressing these tokens
during inference. Extensive experiments on ten benchmarks across textual,
visual, and video reasoning tasks show that NoWait reduces chain-of-thought
trajectory length by up to 27%-51% in five R1-style model series, without
compromising model utility. NoWait thus offers a plug-and-play solution for
efficient and utility-preserving multimodal reasoning.
NoWait suppresses explicit self-reflection tokens during inference to enhance efficiency in multimodal reasoning without reducing model utility.
reasoning models self-reflection tokens NoWait chain-of-thought trajectory length R1-style model series multimodal reasoning