protologue

Overthinking

Also called overthinking problem, excessive reasoning.

Overthinking is the tendency of reasoning models to spend far more reasoning tokens than a problem requires, for example writing long chains of thought for trivial arithmetic, which adds cost and latency with little or no accuracy gain.

Description

Analysis of o1-style models found that later reasoning rounds on simple problems rarely contribute new solutions. Remedies include adjustable reasoning effort or budgets, routing easy queries to non-reasoning models, and training that rewards efficient reasoning.

Sources

  1. Chen et al. (2024). Do NOT Think That Much for 2+3=? On the Overthinking of o1-Like LLMs.

Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Overthinking. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.4.0, PTL-0170). https://protologue.com/t/overthinking/

BibTeX
@misc{protologue_overthinking,
  title = {Overthinking},
  author = {{Protologue}},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques, v1.4.0},
  note = {Entry PTL-0170},
  url = {https://protologue.com/t/overthinking/}
}

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