The Danger of Overthinking: Examining the Reasoning-Action Dilemma in Agentic Tasks

Published
Source
arXiv
Paper number
037
Field
Reasoning / Agents
arXiv ID
2502.08235

Key points

  • LRMs tend to prefer extended internal reasoning over interaction with the environment, which leads to inefficient performance.
  • There is no systematic framework for analyzing and quantifying overthinking behavior in AI systems.
  • Understanding the balance between reasoning and action in interactive environments remains limited.
  • This paper develops a comprehensive framework for studying and measuring excessive deliberation in LRMs.
  • Using SWE Bench Verified, the authors analyzed 4,018 trajectories to identify patterns.
  • They introduced a scoring system that was validated against expert human evaluation.

Paper links

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