Controlling Reasoning Effort in LLMs

It has been almost two years since OpenAI released o1, a model that popularized the idea of LLM-based reasoning models. DeepSeek-R1 followed about four months later, together with details of a reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) recipe to train such reasoning models.Last week, OpenAI released the GPT-5.6 model family. It comes in three sizes, each with roughly five or six reasoning-effort settings.Figure 1: The GPT 5.6 Sol model with different reasoning effort settings. (Benchmark numbers for Ultra are currently not available but should be relatively similar to Max, since it uses a similar effort level but accelerates the work with four subagents.)So yes, reasoning models are here to stay. They have become a standard part of modern model releases.In the past, I covered the methodology of reasoning models (Understanding Reasoning LLMs) as well as relevant research papers (The State of Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning and The State of LLM Reasoning Model Inference). And I even wrote a whole new 440-page book on how to develop reasoning models, Build A Reasoning Model (From Scratch).These resources have focused on turning a conventional LLM into a reasoning model. Now, in this article, I want to focus on and explain how to develop a reasoning model that has multiple effort modes, similar to what’s shown in the figure at the beginning of this article.No worries, this article can be read as a standalone article. However, the aforementioned resources may be interesting and useful.When talking about pretty much any machine learning or AI technique or subfield, the one lesson is that we usually shouldn’t take technical terms “literally”. For example, an (artificial) neural network in machine learning and AI doesn’t literally work like a biological neural network like the human brain.Similarly, when talking about “reasoning models”, we shouldn’t expect that these models literally reason like us humans. In the context of AI and LLM research, “reasoning model” means a model that outputs an intermediate reasoning trace, which is like an intermediate response that works through a question or task step by step.It’s probably easiest to explain this by showing an example.

Figure 3: Illustration of a conventional LLM answer (left) and an answer by a reasoning model (right).There are essentially two ways to improve (reasoning) task performance: training scaling and inference scaling.Figure 4: Training and inference-scaling are two ways to improve LLM and reasoning model problem-solving capabilities. Plot based on Learning to reason with LLMsLet’s briefly talk about training first.In a nutshell, DeepSeek-R1 proposed training an LLM using reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to turn it into a reasoning model. RLVR is a technique to provide a reward signal (0=incorrect and 1=correct) for verifiable data domains. These verifiable data domains here are math (we can use a symbolic math checker like SymPy or WolframAlpha to check results) and code (we can use a compiler or unit tests, or integrated platforms like LeetCode) to check for correctness.Figure 5: Illustration of accuracy and format rewards during RLVR training.Notably, the reasoning trace itself was not used for training or updating the model. Although they tried to use this intermediate response information for training, the DeepSeek-R1 paper reported that it wasn’t helpful for the model training, so it was ultimately not used. (Whether and how to incorporate intermediate reasoning traces in the training signal via process reward models is an active area of research.)Figure 6: The intermediate reasoning trace is ignored during RLVR; only the final answer and response format determine the reward.Anyway, just training on the output rewards alone, as Figure 7 shows, turned out to be sufficient for the model to learn how to reason through a problem, meaning that it would learn to write intermediate explanations, backtrack, and self-correct itself. These moments when the model realizes that it made a mistake and self-corrects itself are called “Aha” moments.Figure 7: An example of an aha moment, where a reasoning model notices an error in its intermediate reasoning and corrects it before producing the final answer.By the way, while DeepSeek-R1 is inarguably the more popular paper, and the paper that created excitement around reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards and the development of reasoning models, there is another paper, Kimi K1.5, published on exactly the same day on arXiv (22 Jan 2025).

Also, the term RLVR was already coined two months earlier in Tülu 3: Pushing Frontiers in Open Language Model Post-Training.One reason why the DeepSeek R1 is ultimately the more popular paper is that it demonstrated that reasoning behavior can be achieved with pure reinforcement learning (RL).Figure 8: DeepSeek-R1-Zero applies RLVR directly to the pretrained base model without supervised fine-tuning.For instance, Tülu 3 and Kimi K1.5 applied reinforcement learning on top of a supervised fine-tuned (SFT) model. The DeepSeek-R1 model was also trained from an SFT checkpoint of the DeepSeek-V3 base model, and it included a DeepSeek-R1-Zero variant trained with pure RLVR. R1 Zero is a weaker model than R1, but it showed that RLVR is sufficient for teaching the model to generate and use reasoning traces.While R1-Zero was more of a proof-of-concept model, note that the full DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model training pipeline is usually multi-stage and a bit more complicated, as mentioned above.Figure 9: More detailed reasoning model training pipeline. This one depicts the various DeepSeek-R1 models. For more details, see my other article: Understanding Reasoning LLMsBy the way, most of today’s LLMs are effectively reasoning models, meaning they have been trained in a similar fashion to DeepSeek-R1 using a form of RLVR.Next to improving reasoning behavior through training, another lever for improving model performance is inference compute scaling. In short, this means that we are spending more compute after training the model, during usage, to get better answers.This is a whole topic by itself, and you could read through my The State of LLM Reasoning Model Inference for a more detailed rundown:I will try to summarize what’s most essential to mention as background info below.First, training a model with RLVR is already implicitly leading to a form of inference scaling, since reasoning models usually output more tokens during inference compared to conventional LLMs, and that means we are spending more compute during inference.Second, we can further adjust this output length via reasoning effort levels, but more on that later.Third, there are many additional inference scaling techniques.

A popular one is self-consistency, which is often implemented as a form of majority voting where the model is queried multiple times, and the final answer is selected via majority vote.Figure 10: An example of self-consistency, a popular inference scaling technique.This can be applied to conventional LLMs as well as reasoning models. Also, this method can be used on demand and in addition to reasoning training. A good example of that is DeepSeekMath-V2, where the researchers applied extreme inference-scaling on top of a reasoning model (specialized for math) to achieve state-of-the-art performance on challenging math olympiad-type problems.But again, I will refer to my other article, The State of LLM Reasoning Model Inference for an overview of other techniques:You may have seen the <think></think> tokens in the earlier “Aha moments” figure. I also included the corresponding figure below so you don’t have to scroll all the way up.Figure 12: Common formatting tokens in reasoning models.These <think> and </think> tags are cosmetic with respect to reasoning ability. They do not make the model reason, and they are not required to achieve good reasoning performance. One could train the same model without these delimiters and likely reach similar benchmark performance.The purpose of these <think> tags or tokens is mainly to mark where the reasoning trace begins and ends so that the training pipeline or user interface can separate it from the final answer and optionally hide it from the user. (UIs like ChatGPT or Codex usually do this.)The point here is that the <think> tokens are not giving the model the ability to “think” or reason or reason better. One could train the same models without such <think> tokens and reach similar benchmark performance.There is also nothing special about the literal strings <think> and </think>. Another pair of delimiters could serve the same purpose.By the way, the way this is implemented is typically by adding a formatting reward during the RLVR stage. So instead of just rewarding the model based on answer correctness, one would provide additional reward for the use of <think> tokens, which in turn encourages the model to use those.

In DeepSeek-R1, for example, the overall reward was calculated asR_total = R_accuracy + R_formatwhere the format reward was a simple rule-based check that encouraged the model to place its reasoning inside:<think>reasoning trace</think>.The first generation of reasoning models was dedicated reasoning models. With that, I mean that there was a DeepSeek-V3 base model and a separate DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model.No matter what the prompt is, R1 generally outputs very verbose responses using lots of tokens, even for simple prompts. It also lacks a built-in option to turn off the reasoning mode.Figure 13: Reasoning models are very verbose, even for the simplest prompts.Later models, like Qwen3 and others, experimented with hybrid approaches, where the same model can behave like a regular instruction fine-tuned model or a reasoning model on demand.Note: Some model developers call this “thinking mode,” while others call it “reasoning mode.” Both terms refer to the same behavior.In Qwen3, this is handled via the tokenizer using enable_thinking=True or enable_thinking=False. Under the hood, setting enable_thinking=False essentially adds an empty <think></think> section to the beginning of the assistant response to turn off Qwen3’s reasoning (”thinking”) mode.Figure 14: Response of Qwen3 0.6B reasoning model with thinking=False and thinking=True. (The empty <think></think> tags are hidden in the interface on the left as they are part of the modified input prompt, not the generated answer.)How is this implemented during training, such that the model supports this toggle during inference time, as shown in the figure above?In short, as explained in the Qwen3 technical report, this on/off behavior is introduced primarily through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and then reinforced during general RL in their largest flagship models.For instance, after the initial reasoning model is trained via long-chain-of-thought SFT and reasoning RL, they add a “Thinking Mode Fusion” stage. During this additional SFT stage, the model sees both thinking and non-thinking examples:/think: <think>{reasoning}</think>{answer}/no_think: <think></think>{answer}Thinking is the default behavior, so /think can also be omitted. The subsequent general RL stage further reinforces this mode and format following.