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arXiv:2508.15260cs.LG

Deep Think with Confidence

Yichao Fu, Xuewei Wang, Yuandong Tian, Jiawei Zhao

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in reasoning tasks through test-time scaling methods like self-consistency with majority voting. However, this approach often leads to diminishing returns in accuracy and high computational overhead. To address these challenges, we introduce Deep Think with Confidence (DeepConf), a simple yet powerful method that enhances both reasoning efficiency and performance at test time. DeepConf leverages model-internal confidence signals to dynamically filter out low-quality reasoning traces during or after generation. It requires no additional model training or hyperparameter tuning and can be seamlessly integrated into existing serving frameworks. We evaluate DeepConf across a variety of reasoning tasks and the latest open-source models, including Qwen 3 and GPT-OSS series. Notably, on challenging benchmarks such as AIME 2025, DeepConf@512 achieves up to 99.9% accuracy and reduces generated tokens by up to 84.7% compared to full parallel thinking.

arXiv comments
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.LGMachine Learning

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Linked by 2 identifiable commenters in 3 comments across 2 threads, from Aug 2025 to Oct 2025.

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    • AIME was saturated with tool use (i.e. 99%) for SotA models, but pure NL, no tool still perform "unreasonably well" on the task. Not 100% but still within 90%. And with lots of compute it can reach 99% as well, apparently [1] (@512 rollouts, but still) [1]…

      NitpickLawyerView on HNParent context

    • > They really can’t. Token prediction based on context does not reason. Debating about "reasoning" or not is not fruitful, IMO. It's an endless debate that can go anywhere and nowhere in particular. I try to look at results: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15260 Abstract: > Large…

      NitpickLawyerView on HNParent context

    • Copied from the paper (halfway down page 6: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15260 ) > "Specifically, DeepConf-low uses top η= 10% (corresponding to the 90th percentile) and DeepConf-high uses top η = 90% (corresponding to the 10th percentile) uniformly across all settings. This…

      sworesView on HNParent context

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