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arXiv · 2509.25827

Overthinking Reduction with Decoupled Rewards and Curriculum Data Scheduling

Shuyang Jiang·Yusheng Liao·Ya Zhang·Yanfeng Wang·Yu Wang
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Abstract

While large reasoning models trained with critic-free reinforcement learning and verifiable rewards (RLVR) represent the state-of-the-art, their practical utility is hampered by ``overthinking'', a critical issue where models generate excessively long reasoning paths without any performance benefit. Existing solutions that penalize length often fail, inducing performance degradation due to a fundamental misalignment between trajectory-level rewards and token-level optimization. In this work, we introduce a novel framework, DECS, built on our theoretical discovery of two previously unaddressed flaws in current length rewards: (1) the erroneous penalization of essential exploratory tokens and (2) the inadvertent rewarding of partial redundancy. Our framework's innovations include (i) a first-of-its-kind decoupled token-level reward mechanism that surgically distinguishes and penalizes redundant tokens, and (ii) a novel curriculum batch scheduling strategy to master the efficiency-efficacy equilibrium. Experimental results show DECS can achieve a dramatic reduction in reasoning tokens by over 50\% across seven benchmarks while simultaneously maintaining or even improving performance. It demonstrates conclusively that substantial gains in reasoning efficiency can be achieved without compromising a model's underlying reasoning power. Code is available at https://github.com/pixas/DECS.

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Shuyang Jiang, Yusheng Liao, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Yu Wang. 2026-03-16. Overthinking Reduction with Decoupled Rewards and Curriculum Data Scheduling. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25827

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