When Does Learning to Stop Help? A Cost-Aware Study of Early Exits in Reasoning Models

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arXiv:2606.30852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning models spend different amounts of useful computation across instances, but it remains unclear when a learned stopping rule improves over simple confidence or convergence thresholds. We study this question with LearnStop, a hidden-state-free checkpoint stopper for reasoning language models. At fixed budget checkpoints, LearnStop probes a short answer from the current reasoning prefix and predicts prefix correctness from online features su