papersSEP 10 04:00 UTC
Study questions self-consensus as a safe early-exit signal for reasoning models
A new arXiv paper examines the practice of cutting reasoning-model inference short by repeatedly sampling answers from a partial reasoning trace and stopping once the probes agree. The authors argue that this self-consensus approach is not a safe signal, since a model that appears settled may still change its final answer. The work also investigates whether any probing-based exit rule can be both reliable and genuinely token-saving.