Improving the Chain-of-Thought Compressibility of Pruned Reasoning Models via Long--Short Contrastive Pruning

Abstract

Large reasoning models are costly to serve because they are large and because they generate long chains of thought (CoT). Weight pruning and CoT compression address these two costs separately, but they interfere in that pruning adds redundant reasoning on problems the model still solves and incomplete reasoning on those it no longer solves, and on harder problems makes the model less compressible by subsequent length-preference optimization. We trace this to a blind spot on each side: pruning criteria do not distinguish necessary from redundant reasoning, and preference-based CoT compression receives no training signal on problems a pruned model always or never solves. We propose Contrastive Set-Difference (CSD), which identifies neurons enriched in redundant reasoning by contrasting their activations on long and short correct solutions of the same problem and prunes them preferentially, and we extend preference pairs to the problems a pruned model always or never solves. Pruning 20\% of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, the combination uses 8--22\% fewer thinking tokens on four math benchmarks than pruning with reasoning-aware calibration (RAC) followed by the same compression, with accuracy within 0.5 points.