Stop Before You Fail: Operational Capability Boundaries for Mitigating Unproductive Reasoning in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2509.24711 · cs.AI, cs.CL · Submitted 2025-09-29 · Read on arXiv

cs.AI, cs.CL

Submitted: 2025-09-29

Updated: 2026-08-31

Terminology

• Accuracy — 29× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 24× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Abstention — 14× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Hard Abstention — 9× in this paper
• Trace — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verification — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Ablation study — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adam — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Curse of Dimensionality — 2× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Interpretability — 2× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• Reasoning Traces — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Alignment — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmarking — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Feature Selection — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Hallucination — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Linear Discriminant Analysis — 1× in this paper
• Linear probe — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Logistic Regression — 1× in this paper
• Permutation Importance — 1× in this paper
• Pruning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• RAG — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Redundancy — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Sparsity — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Verifier — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card
• Large Language Models for Mathematical Reasoning: Progresses and Challenges
• Monitoring Reasoning Models for Misbehavior and the Risks of Promoting Obfuscation
• Overflow Prevention Enhances Long-Context Recurrent LLMs
• Thought Anchors: Which LLM Reasoning Steps Matter?
• RBF++: Quantifying and Optimizing Reasoning Boundaries across Measurable and Unmeasurable Capabilities for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
• Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models
• Do NOT Think That Much for 2+3=? On the Overthinking of o1-Like LLMs
• Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems
• Not All Layers of LLMs Are Necessary During Inference
• Efficiently Scaling LLM Reasoning with Certaindex
• Deep Think with Confidence
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey
• DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
• Can Large Language Models Detect Errors in Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning?
• OpenAI o1 System Card
• LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code
• Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know
• AbstentionBench: Reasoning LLMs Fail on Unanswerable Questions
• Semantic Uncertainty: Linguistic Invariances for Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation

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