ARTFEED — Contemporary Art Intelligence

BET: A Budget-Efficient Thinking Framework for Adaptive Reasoning in LRMs

ai-technology · 2026-05-13

Researchers propose Budget-Efficient Thinking (BET), a two-stage framework to optimize test-time compute in large reasoning models (LRMs). BET addresses the misallocation of computational budgets by considering solvability, not just perceived difficulty. It combines behavioral cold-start with GRPO under an investment-cost-aware reward, learning three behaviors: short solve, long solve, and fold. The approach aims to reduce costs while maintaining accuracy on solvable queries.

Key facts

  • Large reasoning models (LRMs) often misallocate test-time compute.
  • Existing efficiency methods overlook solvability.
  • BET formulates adaptive reasoning as computational investment under uncertainty.
  • BET uses a two-stage framework: behavioral cold-start and GRPO.
  • The reward is investment-cost-aware.
  • BET learns three behaviors: short solve, long solve, and fold.
  • The goal is to reduce cost without sacrificing accuracy on solvable queries.
  • The paper is arXiv:2605.11625v1.

Entities

Institutions

  • arXiv

Sources