Explore Briefly, Then Decide: Mitigating LLM Overthinking via Cumulative Entropy Regulation

Abstract: LLMs have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities on complex problems using long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, they often suffer from overthinking, meaning generating unnecessarily lengthy reasoning steps for simpler problems. This issue may degrade the efficiency of the models and make them difficult to adapt the reasoning depth to the complexity of problems. To address this, we introduce a novel metric Token Entropy Cumulative Average (TECA), which measures the extent of exploration throughout the reasoning process. We further propose a novel reasoning paradigm -- Explore Briefly, Then Decide -- with an associated Cumulative Entropy Regulation (CER) mechanism. This paradigm leverages TECA to help the model dynamically determine the optimal point to conclude its thought process and provide a final answer, thus achieving efficient reasoning. Experimental results across diverse mathematical benchmarks show that our approach substantially mitigates overthinking without sacrificing problem-solving ability. With our thinking paradigm, the average response length decreases by up to 71% on simpler datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in creating a more efficient and adaptive reasoning process.