Token Budget Saturation and Mechanistic Early Detection of Reasoning Non-Convergence in Chain-of-Thought Models

Renuka Oladri, Niveda Jawahar, Abdirisak Mohamed

Chain-of-thought reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B exhibit a bimodal convergence pattern: generations either terminate within a token budget (converged) or exhau…