Are Large Reasoning Models Interruptible?
On the map: LLM reasoning → Test-time compute and efficient thinking
Abstract (arXiv)
Real-world applications of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often require reasoning about changing prompts or environments. In this work, we challenge the frozen world assumption and evaluate LRM robustness under two realistic dynamic scenarios: interruptions, which test the accuracy of model responses under budget-constrained outputs, and dynamic context, which tests model adaptation to in-flight changes. Across mathematics and programming benchmarks that require long-form reasoning, static evaluations consistently overestimate robustness: even state-of-the-art LRMs, which achieve high accuracy in static settings, can fail unpredictably when interrupted or exposed to changing context, with performance dropping by up to 60% when updates are introduced late in the reasoning process. Our analysis further reveals several novel failure modes, including reasoning leakage, where models fold the reasoning into their final answer when interrupted; panic, where under time pressure models abandon reasoning entirely and return incorrect answers; and self-doubt, where performance degrades when trying to incorporate updated information. Project Page: http://dynamic-lm.github.io/
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 30 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2025.
Builds on
30 of 47 references.
Closest ancestors · 16
Same direction, newest first
- 2025K2-Think: A Parameter-Efficient Reasoning System9 Sep
- 2025NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2: An Accurate and Efficient Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Reasoning Model20 Aug
- 2025gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card8 Aug
- 2025Steering LLM Thinking with Budget Guidance16 Jun
- 2025Wait, We Don't Need to "Wait"! Removing Thinking Tokens Improves Reasoning Efficiency10 Jun
- 2025ThinkLess: A Training-Free Inference-Efficient Method for Reducing Reasoning Redundancy21 May
- 2025Reasoning Models Can Be Effective Without Thinking14 Apr
- 2025Missing Premise exacerbates Overthinking: Are Reasoning Models losing Critical Thinking Skill?9 Apr
- 2025Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models20 Mar
- 2025InftyThink: Breaking the Length Limits of Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models9 Mar
- 2025Self-Training Elicits Concise Reasoning in Large Language Models27 Feb
- 2025Meta-Reasoner: Dynamic Guidance for Optimized Inference-time Reasoning in Large Language Models27 Feb
4 more
Other references · 14
- 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 9,743
- 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
- 2023Let's Verify Step by Stepcited by 3,598
- 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
- 2023GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmarkcited by 2,748
- 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 1,906
- 2024OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problemscited by 1,099
- 2025Chain of Draft: Thinking Faster by Writing Lesscited by 290
- 2025Training Language Models to Reason Efficientlycited by 242
- 2024Distilling System 2 into System 1cited by 152
- 2025Sketch-of-Thought: Efficient LLM Reasoning with Adaptive Cognitive-Inspired Sketchingcited by 116
- 2024Can Language Models Learn to Skip Steps?cited by 59
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 5.
6 papers.
- 2026When Users Change Their Mind: Evaluating Interruptible Agents in Long-Horizon Web Navigationcited by 12
- 2026When to Think, When to Speak: Learning Disclosure Policies for LLM Reasoningcited by 4
- 2026Mitigating loss of control in advanced AI systems through instrumental goal trajectoriescited by 1
- 2026Never Stop Thinking: Continuous-Time Language Agentscited by 1
- 2025An Aristotelian ontology of instrumental goals: Structural features to be managed and not failures to be eliminatedcited by 0
- 2026Shorter Reasoning, Earlier Answers? An Evaluation of Reasoning Interfacescited by 0
- 2026Shorter Reasoning, Earlier Answers? An Evaluation of Reasoning Interfaces4 Aug 2026
- 2026Never Stop Thinking: Continuous-Time Language Agents11 Jul 2026
- 2026When to Think, When to Speak: Learning Disclosure Policies for LLM Reasoning5 May 2026
- 2026When Users Change Their Mind: Evaluating Interruptible Agents in Long-Horizon Web Navigation1 Apr 2026
- 2026Mitigating loss of control in advanced AI systems through instrumental goal trajectories2 Feb 2026
- 2025An Aristotelian ontology of instrumental goals: Structural features to be managed and not failures to be eliminated29 Oct 2025
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025Is Long-to-Short a Free Lunch? Investigating Inconsistency and Reasoning Efficiency in LRMs
- 2025Exploring LLM Reasoning Through Controlled Prompt Variations
- 2026"I May Not Have Articulated Myself Clearly": Diagnosing Dynamic Instability in LLM Reasoning at Inference Time
- 2025Stop Before You Fail: Operational Capability Boundaries for Mitigating Unproductive Reasoning in Large Reasoning Models
- 2026A Temporal Reasoning Benchmarking Framework for LRMs via Difficulty-controlled and Dynamic Test Generation
- 2025Inverse Scaling in Test-Time Compute
- 2026Dissecting Failure Dynamics in Large Language Model Reasoning
- 2025Answering the Unanswerable Is to Err Knowingly: Analyzing and Mitigating Abstention Failures in Large Reasoning Models