Writing study: Overthinking Reduction with Decoupled Rewards and Curriculum Data Scheduling

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← ICLR 2026 oral writing corpus

Shuyang Jiang, Yusheng Liao, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Yu Wang · Official ICLR 2026 oral record

Observed writing choices, not acceptance rules. This study examines the inspected manuscript version. It does not establish why the paper was accepted or that its presentation choices should be copied unchanged.

Figure, table and section ledger

Editorial contribution type: Learning & optimization algorithms (primary).

Layout extraction, not a required paper template. Counts are distinct caption labels; a multi-panel figure counts once. Section spans are estimated from heading positions, including floats and whitespace. Method and limitations.

Canonical PDF

30 physical pages

Before references / appendix

≈ 9.86 page-equivalents

Main figures / tables

4 / 2

Attached appendix figures / tables

11 / 9

Attached appendix span

≈ 16.36 page-equivalents

Before references / appendix: ≈ 32.87%References / intervening material: ≈ 12.6%Attached appendix: ≈ 54.53%Estimated layout envelopes, not text/artwork area. Unresolved appendix boundaries remain within the undivided post-body material.

Section-by-section lengths and source pages

The title/abstract/front matter precede the first numbered heading. A span ends at the next detected top-level heading, not at the last sentence; end-page whitespace is included. References and statements are listed separately. These are not measurements of text-only or artwork area.

Top-level heading	Starts on PDF page	Estimated span	Share of entire PDF
1 INTRODUCTION	2	≈ 1.12 pp.	3.73%
2 PRELIMINARY	3	≈ 0.64 pp.	2.13%
3 ON THE LIMITATIONS OF LENGTH-GUIDED REASONING OPTIMIZATION	3	≈ 1.72 pp.	5.73%
4 DECS	5	≈ 1.75 pp.	5.83%
5 EXPERIMENTS	7	≈ 1.31 pp.	4.37%
6 ANALYSIS	8	≈ 1.78 pp.	5.93%
7 CONCLUSION	10	≈ 0.15 pp.	0.5%
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	10	≈ 0.1 pp.	0.33%
8 REPRODUCIBILITY STATEMENT	10	≈ 0.19 pp.	0.63%
REFERENCES	10	≈ 3.78 pp.	12.6%
A THEORETICAL SUPPORT	14	≈ 2.59 pp.	8.63%
B RELATED WORK	17	≈ 0.62 pp.	2.07%
C DETAILED ANALYSIS OF DECOUPLED REWARD DESIGN	17	≈ 1.77 pp.	5.9%
D CORRELATION TO RELATIVE OVERGENERALIZATION IN MULTI-AGENT	19	≈ 0.67 pp.	2.23%
E LIMITATION & FUTURE WORK	20	≈ 0.27 pp.	0.9%
F USE OF LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS	20	≈ 0.07 pp.	0.23%
G EXPERIMENTAL DETAILS	20	≈ 2.09 pp.	6.97%
H ADDITIONAL EXPERIMENTS	22	≈ 2.87 pp.	9.57%
I CASE STUDY	25	≈ 5.4 pp.	18%

All detected figure and table locations

Main text

• Figure 1 · p. 1
• Figure 2 · p. 6
• Table 1 · p. 8
• Table 2 · p. 8
• Figure 3 · p. 9
• Figure 4 · p. 9

Attached appendix

• Table 3 · p. 17
• Table 4 · p. 18
• Table 5 · p. 19
• Table 6 · p. 19
• Table 7 · p. 19
• Table 8 · p. 20
• Figure 5 · p. 23
• Table 9 · p. 23
• Figure 6 · p. 24
• Figure 7 · p. 24
• Table 10 · p. 24
• Figure 8 · p. 25
• Table 11 · p. 25
• Figure 9 · p. 25
• Figure 10 · p. 26
• Figure 11 · p. 26
• Figure 12 · p. 27
• Figure 13 · p. 28
• Figure 14 · p. 29
• Figure 15 · p. 30

Argument and organization

1. Introduction / Preliminaries / Rethinking Length Rewards

   Introduces two credit-assignment failures before the proposed correction.

2. Decoupled Rewards and Curriculum Data Scheduling

   Defines necessary-prefix detection, position-wise reward assignment and prompt scheduling.

3. Experiments / Analysis

   Separates benchmark outcomes from five numbered mechanism questions.

4. Appendices A–I

   Documents proofs, detector training, limitations, evaluation settings and qualitative examples.

Problem, claim and contribution

Two failure modes—penalizing essential reasoning and rewarding redundant continuations—organize both the analysis and method. The problem is credit assignment inside a sequence, not an assertion that all long reasoning is undesirable.

§§1, 3, pp.2–5 · Main paper

Argument and section order

Formal prefix and advantage definitions precede the three method components. Later analysis explicitly answers five research questions, making each auxiliary experiment's purpose easy to recover.

§§3–4, pp.4–7; §6, pp.8–10 · Main paper

Figures, captions and visual explanation

Figure 2 carries the same arithmetic example through generation, prefix detection, reward assignment and curriculum feedback. Separate colors distinguish necessary tokens, answers and redundant positions; the return arrow shows the training loop rather than an inference pipeline.

Figure 2, p.6 · Main paper

Tables, comparisons and evidence

Tables 1–2 pair accuracy with token counts and a declared composite metric. Appendix G spells out variable rollout counts and pass@K estimation, preventing these averaged pass@1 scores from being mistaken for one deterministic completion per problem.

§5.1, p.7; Tables 1–2, p.8; Appendix G, pp.20–22 · Main paper

Appendix and reproducibility

The detector is not a free oracle: its teacher annotations, 5,000-problem training set, human checks and timing costs are reported. Qualitative examples mark the necessary prefix separately from remaining text, connecting the proxy to observable outputs.

Tables 6–7, p.19; Appendix G.6, p.22; Figures 13–15, pp.28–30 · Main paper

Clarity and writing conventions

The limitations section acknowledges the auxiliary detector and maximum evaluated model scale. Its optimistic larger-model extrapolation should remain a hypothesis, and the introductory fitted efficiency curve should not be read as a proved optimal frontier.

Appendices E, G.5, pp.20–22 · Main paper

What to reuse—and what not to infer

Transferable lesson: Show the training credit-assignment mechanism with a running example, then report both quality and resource costs plus a dedicated proxy-quality check.

Boundary: Figure 2 allows positive advantages for some redundant middle tokens, despite broader all-redundant-token prose. Appendix C supports a narrower leading-token argument under assumptions. Appendix H tunes beta on AIME2024, also a reported benchmark; avoid describing every evaluation as untouched held-out testing.

Apply this lesson using the argument and evidence worksheet.

Inspection record and sources

Checked

2026-09-19

Reading status

Full text + selected visuals inspected

Main text

PDF pp.1–10, abstract and §§1–7; references pp.11–14

Appendix / supplement

PDF pp.14–30, Appendices A–I: proofs, related work, reward analysis, limitations, disclosure, protocols and case studies; corrupted Figure 11–12 extraction checked as rendered pages

Visually inspected PDF pages

6, 8, 26, 27

• official ICLR 2026 proceedings PDF · 30 pages