Not All Tokens Are What You Need In Thinking

Modern reasoning models, such as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek-R1, exhibit impressive problem-solving capabilities but suffer from critical inefficiencies: high inference latency, excessive computational resource consumption, and a tendency toward overthinking-generating verbose chains of thought (CoT) laden with redundant tokens that contribute minimally to the final answer. To address these issues, we propose Conditional Token Selection (CTS), a token-level compression framework with a flexible and variable compression ratio that identifies and preserves only the most essential tokens in CoT. Using conditional importance scoring, CTS evaluates each token's contribution to deriving correct answers and then trains models on compressed CoT. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CTS effectively compresses long CoT while maintaining strong reasoning performance.