arxivcs.CLcs.AIcs.LG2026-07-23
Token Budget Saturation and Mechanistic Early Detection of Reasoning Non-Convergence in Chain-of-Thought Models
Renuka Oladri, Niveda Jawahar, Abdirisak Mohamed
Chain-of-thought reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B exhibit a bimodal convergence pattern: generations either terminate within a token budget (converged) or exhaust it without reaching a conclusion (non-converged). We characterize this phenomenon empirically, sh…