AI RESEARCH
Stop Before You Fail: Operational Capability Boundaries for Mitigating Unproductive Reasoning in Large Reasoning Models
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2509.24711v3 Announce Type: replace Current answering paradigms for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often fail to account for the fact that some questions may lie beyond the model's operational capability boundary, leading to long but unproductive reasoning. In this paper, we study whether LRMs expose early signals predictive of such cases, and whether these signals can be used to mitigate unproductive reasoning. In black-box settings, we find that reasoning expressions contain failure-predictive signals.