The Termination Circuit (how reasoning models stop thinking).

Reasoning models since the dawn of o1 and R1 have a tendency to overthink. Despite a lot of work on early-exit methods and steering, open-weight and smaller reasoning models still produce long chains of thought before they answer. I worked on discovering how much of that thinking is required before the model already knows the answer and what makes the model stop thinking.SummaryReasoning models keep thinking for a long time even after finding the answer.In Qwen3-1.7B, the answer to most GSM8K pr...