A Token Budget Is Not a Truncation Rule
TL;DR for operators A smaller output budget is not necessarily a cheaper version of the same reasoning process. In the paper’s Qwen-4B experiment, hard-capping generation at roughly 2,000 tokens drops average accuracy from 62.4% to 31.94%. Two models trained to reason within approximately the same output budget retain 61.0% and 62.3% accuracy. ...