The Perils of Overthinking: How AI Can Get Stuck in Its Own Thoughts
Large reasoning models often prioritize extended internal reasoning over taking action, leading to three recurring problems:
1. Analysis Paralysis – The model endlessly debates potential solutions but never executes one.
2. Rogue Actions – It makes unnecessary or unhelpful moves instead of focusing on the task.
3. Premature Disengagement – It stops reasoning too soon and submits incomplete solutions.
The more an AI model overthinks, the worse its performance. Surprisingly, choosing solutions with lower overthinking scores improved accuracy by nearly 30% while cutting computing costs by 43%.
The findings highlight that overthinking isn't just a human problem—it hampers AI, too. To combat this, the researchers propose techniques like leveraging AI’s ability to call external functions and using reinforcement learning to fine-tune decision-making.
Paper: https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2502.08235
Large reasoning models often prioritize extended internal reasoning over taking action, leading to three recurring problems:
1. Analysis Paralysis – The model endlessly debates potential solutions but never executes one.
2. Rogue Actions – It makes unnecessary or unhelpful moves instead of focusing on the task.
3. Premature Disengagement – It stops reasoning too soon and submits incomplete solutions.
The more an AI model overthinks, the worse its performance. Surprisingly, choosing solutions with lower overthinking scores improved accuracy by nearly 30% while cutting computing costs by 43%.
The findings highlight that overthinking isn't just a human problem—it hampers AI, too. To combat this, the researchers propose techniques like leveraging AI’s ability to call external functions and using reinforcement learning to fine-tune decision-making.
Paper: https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2502.08235