Reasoning Has an Opportunity Cost: Allocate Compute Before You Spend It
TL;DR for operators When several subtasks share one hard inference budget, spending more on the current task leaves less capacity for everything downstream. Under a 512-token budget, untreated Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct scored 0.33 on Medium and 0.15 on Hard three-question papers. A version trained to anticipate reasoning cost and allocate effort across the sequence scored 0.97 and 0.93. ...