ShorterBetter: Guiding Reasoning Models to Find Optimal Inference Length for Efficient Reasoning

Recent models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have demonstrated strong performance on reasoning-intensive tasks by generating extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces. While longer reasoning helps with thorough exploration of solution paths for complex problems, it also often leads to inefficient and redundant outputs—a phenomenon commonly described as $\textit{overthinking}$. In this paper, we propose $\texttt{ShorterBetter}$, a simple yet effective reinforcement learning method that enables reasoning models to learn their own optimal CoT lengths without manual supervision. We define the $\textit{Sample Optimal Length}$ (SOL) as the length of the shortest correct response among multiple generations, which serves as a dynamic reward signal to guide the model toward efficient reasoning. Applied to DeepSeek-Distill-Qwen-1.5B/7B as base models, $\texttt{ShorterBetter}$ achieves 50\%-80\% reduction in output lengths in both in-domain and out-of-domain reasoning tasks while maintaining accuracy. Our reasoning trace analysis shows that $\texttt{ShorterBetter}$ refines the structure of the reasoning traces by reducing unnecessary repetition, excessive self-verification, and over-exploration of alternatives.