# Asynchronous Reasoning: Training-Free Interactive Thinking LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10931 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10931/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio-language model reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 64 of its 139 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Audio-language model reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/audio-language-model-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16291/) (2023)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01574/) (2024)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [s1: Simple test-time scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19393/) (2025)
- [OpenAI o1 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16720/) (2024)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [SGLang: Efficient Execution of Structured Language Model Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07104/) (2023)
- [Automatic Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03493/) (2022)
- [Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07919/) (2023)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20534/) (2025)
- [Qwen3-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17765/) (2025)
- [Humanity's Last Exam](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14249/) (2025)
- [Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10135/) (2017)
- [Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16419/) (2025)
- [LLMs Get Lost In Multi-Turn Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06120/) (2025)
- [AppAgent: Multimodal Agents as Smartphone Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13771/) (2023)
- [Llemma: An Open Language Model For Mathematics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10631/) (2023)
- [Monitoring Reasoning Models for Misbehavior and the Risks of Promoting Obfuscation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11926/) (2025)
- [AudioPaLM: A Large Language Model That Can Speak and Listen](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12925/) (2023)
- [Chain of Draft: Thinking Faster by Writing Less](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18600/) (2025)
- [Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11473/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Early Exit in Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15895/) (2025)
- [Mini-Omni: Language Models Can Hear, Talk While Thinking in Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16725/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [From Static Inference to Dynamic Interaction: A Survey of Streaming Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04592/) (2026)
- [Speculative Interaction Agents: Building Real-Time Agents with Asynchronous I/O and Speculative Tool Calling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13360/) (2026)
- [Never Stop Thinking: Continuous-Time Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17416/) (2026)
- [ProactiveLLM: Learning Active Interaction for Streaming Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00523/) (2026)
- [Second Thought: Reasoning in Parallel as LLM Agents Act and Observe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13667/) (2026)
- [LLMs are General Asynchronous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35427/) (2026)
- [Foresight: planning future perception in streaming VLMs without retraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03123/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many state-of-the-art LLMs are trained to think before giving their answer. Reasoning can greatly improve language model capabilities, but it also makes them less interactive: given a new input, a model must stop thinking before it can respond. Real-world use cases such as voice-based or embodied assistants require an LLM agent to respond and adapt to additional information in real time, which is incompatible with sequential interactions. In contrast, humans can listen, think, and act asynchronously: we begin thinking about the problem while reading it and continue thinking while formulating the answer. In this work, we augment LLMs capable of reasoning to operate in a similar way without additional training. Our method uses the properties of positional embeddings to enable LLMs built for sequential generation to simultaneously think, listen, and write outputs. We evaluate our approach on math, commonsense, and safety reasoning: it allows models to generate accurate thinking-augmented answers while reducing time to first non-thinking token from minutes to ≤ 5s and the overall delays by up to 12×.