DART: Draft-Agreement Routing for Training-Free Adaptive Thinking Budgets in Hybrid Reasoning Models
On the map: LLM reasoning → Test-time compute and efficient thinking
Abstract (arXiv)
Hybrid reasoning models can answer directly or spend extra tokens on extended thinking. A practical router should choose between these modes for each query, so easy problems avoid unnecessary reasoning and hard problems receive enough budget to finish the answer. Existing routers move in this direction, but they typically require labeled training data or fix thinking budgets up front, ignoring answer-level evidence from the model itself. We introduce DART, a training-free routing framework that samples two cheap no-think drafts, accepts direct answering when the drafts agree, and predicts a thinking budget from draft entropy when they disagree. Across the main comparisons, DART preserves or improves always-thinking accuracy in most settings while reducing thinking-token use. Accuracy improves by up to +9.0 points on Olympiad-level math and by up to +22.5 points on code under execution-based equivalence, while thinking-token use drops by 32-73%. The Stage~1 signal extends across model scales (0.6B--32B), model families, and API-only hosted settings, with no labeled data and no gradient updates required. Our code is available at https://github.com/js-lee-AI/DART.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 19 of its 45 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Jun 2026.
Builds on
19 of 45 references.
Closest ancestors · 9
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Demystifying Hybrid Thinking: Can LLMs Truly Switch Between Think and No-Think?14 Oct
- 2025Hierarchical Budget Policy Optimization for Adaptive Reasoning21 Jul
- 2025Reasoning on a Budget: A Survey of Adaptive and Controllable Test-Time Compute in LLMs2 Jul
- 2025Do Thinking Tokens Help or Trap? Towards More Efficient Large Reasoning Model30 Jun
- 2025Route to Reason: Adaptive Routing for LLM and Reasoning Strategy Selection26 May
- 2025SelfBudgeter: Adaptive Token Allocation for Efficient LLM Reasoning16 May
- 2025Reasoning Models Can Be Effective Without Thinking14 Apr
- 2024Make Every Penny Count: Difficulty-Adaptive Self-Consistency for Cost-Efficient Reasoning24 Aug
- 2022Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know11 Jul
Other references · 10
- 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,820
- 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,320
- 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,330
- 2018Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challengecited by 4,886
- 2021Program Synthesis with Large Language Modelscited by 3,637
- 2024Qwen2.5-Math Technical Report: Toward Mathematical Expert Model via Self-Improvementcited by 1,090
- 2025DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Modelscited by 815
- 2016Adaptive Computation Time for Recurrent Neural Networkscited by 506
- 2025MiniCPM-V 4.5: Cooking Efficient MLLMs via Architecture, Data, and Training Recipecited by 186
- 2026Nemotron 3 Nano Omni: Efficient and Open Multimodal Intelligencecited by 30
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.
8 papers.
- 2026Commit Locally, Exit Globally: Coordinating Adaptive Sampling and Early Exit in Diffusion Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Faster Block-Diffusion Serving with Distribution-Free Risk Guaranteescited by 0
- 2026Where Activation Sparsity and KV-Cache Sparsity Cross in LLM Decodingcited by 0
- 2026Risk-Controlled Selective LLM Answering by Pricing Label-Free Checkscited by 0
- 2026CAST: Cost-Aware Speculative Trees from One-Pass Block Drafterscited by 0
- 2026Distilling Directional Verificationcited by 0
- 2026What Does a Harness Repair? A Preregistered Study of Visibility, Baseline Adequacy and Evaluation Defectscited by 0
- 2026When Should Agents Think? Adaptive Reasoning via Cross-Turn Estimationcited by 0
- 2026When Should Agents Think? Adaptive Reasoning via Cross-Turn Estimation8 Oct 2026
- 2026What Does a Harness Repair? A Preregistered Study of Visibility, Baseline Adequacy and Evaluation Defects4 Oct 2026
- 2026Distilling Directional Verification1 Oct 2026
- 2026CAST: Cost-Aware Speculative Trees from One-Pass Block Drafters29 Sep 2026
- 2026Risk-Controlled Selective LLM Answering by Pricing Label-Free Checks27 Sep 2026
- 2026Where Activation Sparsity and KV-Cache Sparsity Cross in LLM Decoding27 Sep 2026
- 2026Faster Block-Diffusion Serving with Distribution-Free Risk Guarantees27 Sep 2026
- 2026Commit Locally, Exit Globally: Coordinating Adaptive Sampling and Early Exit in Diffusion Language Models30 Jul 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026HRBench: Benchmarking and Understanding Thinking-Mode Switch Strategies in Hybrid-Reasoning LLMs
- 2025Rethinking Thinking Tokens: LLMs as Improvement Operators
- 2026Thinking with Reasoning Skills: Fewer Tokens, More Accuracy
- 2026Knowing When Thinking Is Not Enough: Teaching Small Reasoning Models to Reason Beyond Their Parametric Knowledge
- 2026ThinkRouter: Efficient Reasoning via Routing Thinking between Latent and Discrete Spaces
- 2025DART: Difficulty-Adaptive Reasoning Truncation for Efficient Large Language Models
- 2026Reasoning Can Be Restored by Correcting a Few Decision Tokens
- 2025Measuring the Faithfulness of Thinking Drafts in Large Reasoning Models