Overclocking LLM Reasoning: Monitoring and Controlling Thinking Path
  Lengths in LLMs
Authors: name: Roy Eisenstadt; name: Itamar Zimerman; name: Lior Wolf
Published: 2025-06-08 17:54:33

Abstract: Recently, techniques such as explicit structured reasoning have demonstrated
strong test-time scaling behavior by enforcing a separation between the model's
internal "thinking" process and the final response. A key factor influencing
answer quality in this setting is the length of the thinking stage. When the
reasoning is too short, the model may fail to capture the complexity of the
task. Conversely, when it is too long, the model may overthink, leading to
unnecessary computation and degraded performance. This paper explores and
exploits the underlying mechanisms by which LLMs understand and regulate the
length of their reasoning during explicit thought processes. First, we show
that LLMs encode their progress through the reasoning process and introduce an
interactive progress bar visualization, which is then used to reveal insights
on the model's planning dynamics. Second, we manipulate the internal progress
encoding during inference to reduce unnecessary steps and generate a more
concise and decisive chain of thoughts. Our empirical results demonstrate that
this "overclocking" method mitigates overthinking, improves answer accuracy,
and reduces inference latency. Our code is publicly available.