Chenxu Niu
2025
Can We Steer Reasoning Direction by Thinking Intervention?
Xingsheng Zhang
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Luxi Xing
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Chen Zhang
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Yanbing Liu
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Yifan Deng
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Yunpeng Li
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Yue Hu
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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.
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- Yifan Deng 1
- Yue Hu (胡月) 1
- Yunpeng Li 1
- Yanbing Liu 1
- Luxi Xing 1
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