SmartThinker: Progressive Chain-of-Thought Length Calibration for Efficient Large Language Model Reasoning

Large reasoning models (LRMs) like OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 achieve high accuracy on complex tasks by adopting long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning paths. However, the inherent verbosity of these processes frequently results in redundancy and overthinking. To address this issue, existing works leverage Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to reduce LRM output length, but their static length reward design cannot dynamically adapt according to the relative problem difficulty and response length distribution, causing over-compression and compromised accuracy. In this paper, we propose SmartThinker, a novel GRPO-based efficient reasoning method with progressive CoT length calibration. SmartThinker makes a two-fold contribution: First, it dynamically estimates the optimal length with peak accuracy during training, and further guides the overlong responses to approach the optimal length, in order to achieve length reduction while sustaining high accuracy. Second, it dynamically modulates the length reward coefficient to avoid the unwarranted penalization of correct reasoning paths. Extensive experiment results show that SmartThinker achieves up to 52.5\% average length compression with improved accuracy, and achieves up to 16.6\% accuracy improvement on challenging benchmarks like AIME25.