Efficient Reasoning Models: A Survey
Authors: name: Sicheng Feng; name: Gongfan Fang; name: Xinyin Ma; name: Xinchao Wang
Published: 2025-04-15 06:28:00

Abstract: Reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable progress in solving complex and
logic-intensive tasks by generating extended Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs) prior to
arriving at a final answer. Yet, the emergence of this "slow-thinking"
paradigm, with numerous tokens generated in sequence, inevitably introduces
substantial computational overhead. To this end, it highlights an urgent need
for effective acceleration. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive
overview of recent advances in efficient reasoning. It categorizes existing
works into three key directions: (1) shorter - compressing lengthy CoTs into
concise yet effective reasoning chains; (2) smaller - developing compact
language models with strong reasoning capabilities through techniques such as
knowledge distillation, other model compression techniques, and reinforcement
learning; and (3) faster - designing efficient decoding strategies to
accelerate inference. A curated collection of papers discussed in this survey
is available in our GitHub repository.