A small token penalty cuts quantized models’ overthinking
Quantized reasoning models can reach the right answer, then talk themselves out of it, and a training-free penalty on tokens such as “wait” and “but” cuts that failure mode. Across five models from 1.5B to 32B parameters, the method reduced chain-of-thought length by 12–23% while preserving or improving accuracy; on Qwen 1.5B at 3-bit quantization, the paper reports 61.2% accuracy with 12.9k response tokens versus 47.0% and 23.4k by default.