Every Token Leaves a Ripple in the Stream of Thought: Eliciting Model-Internal Token Saliency for Chain-of-Thought Compression

Tianyi Zhao, Yinhan He, Wendy Zheng +1

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves multi-step problem solving, but long reasoning traces inflate inference cost. Token-level CoT compression reduces this cost by pruning ful…