Chenxu Niu


2025

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Can We Steer Reasoning Direction by Thinking Intervention?
Xingsheng Zhang | Luxi Xing | Chen Zhang | Yanbing Liu | Yifan Deng | Yunpeng Li | Yue Hu | Chenxu Niu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025

Large Reason Models (LRMs) extend long reasoning process to solve complex tasks. However, due to the lack of fine-grained control, they often suffer from overthinking and erroneous reasoning problems, risking accuracy loss. To address this issue, we introduce Reasoning Direction Steering (RDS) to enable fine-grained control over LRMs’ reasoning behaviors by aligning reasoning trajectories with specific cognitive patterns. We develop a simple yet effective paradigm, Thinking Intervention, which explores two key dimensions - intervention positions and intervention styles - to achieve integration intervention throughout model reasoning processes. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct comprehensive experiments on multi-hop question answering tasks using state-of-the-art LRMs, including Qwen3-Series and R1-Series models. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of Thinking Intervention with 9.4% average improvement on R1-Series models and 1.9% improvement on Qwen3-Series models.