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abstract indexed · arXiv 2610.12061 · updated 2026-10-18

When Should Agents Think? Adaptive Reasoning via Cross-Turn Estimation

First page of When Should Agents Think? Adaptive Reasoning via Cross-Turn Estimation
From the original paper · arXiv 2610.12061Page 1. Select the image to read the PDF.

RACE replaces the default policy of generating a reasoning step before every agent action with a learned policy that reasons only when prior reasoning no longer supports the next action, using likelihood drops on reference actions as a cheap removal signal. The cost is a training pipeline: the LoGiC detection procedure requires likelihood evaluation over reference trajectories, followed by supervised fine-tuning and agentic reinforcement learning, plus reference action data that may not exist for custom tasks. It can fail when the likelihood-drop signal misestimates cross-turn support, causing the policy to skip reasoning on turns where new reasoning is actually needed, and the gains may not transfer to domains or base models different from the training setup.

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What you would change

Try the proposed planning step on tasks with checkable intermediate outcomes.

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Try the proposed planning step on tasks with checkable intermediate outcomes.

Compare against

The same agent solving the same tasks without the new planning step.

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  3. Run the baseline and the proposed change on identical inputs. Keep other settings fixed and repeat paired runs to expose variation.
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What to measure

Task completion, unnecessary steps, planning tokens, response time, and total cost.

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Why it was shortlisted

The technical change, research area, and reason it entered the archive.

recommendation
test
research area
planning and decomposition
technical change
Adaptive per-turn reasoning gating via likelihood estimation (RACE)
published
2026-10-08

The approach directly targets inference cost on constrained infrastructure, but adopting it requires SFT plus agentic RL and reference-action data, so it warrants a small-scale validation on the reader's own workloads rather than immediate production adoption.

About the technical core

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Claims and evidence

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  1. claim 01Paperraft inference
    Read the brief interpretation

    RACE replaces the default policy of generating a reasoning step before every agent action with a learned policy that reasons only when prior reasoning no longer supports the next action, using likelihood drops on reference actions as a cheap removal signal. The cost is a training pipeline: the LoGiC detection procedure requires likelihood evaluation over reference trajectories, followed by supervised fine-tuning and agentic reinforcement learning, plus reference action data that may not exist for custom tasks. It can fail when the likelihood-drop signal misestimates cross-turn support, causing the policy to skip reasoning on turns where new reasoning is actually needed, and the gains may not transfer to domains or base models different from the training setup.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

    Inspect the source
  2. claim 02Paperraft inference

    RACE substantially reduces reasoning cost while maintaining or improving task performance on four agent benchmarks; no specific numeric factor is given in the abstract.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

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Exposure map

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quality

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compute and memory

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latency

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operations

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software compatibility

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security

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data and training

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reproducibility

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Continue the investigation

A reading guide for planning and decomposition.

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Questions for adoption

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Inside the paper

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arXiv 2610.12061

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