{"slug": "adathinking-e-one-token-entropy-regulation-for-adaptive-thinking", "title": "AdaThinking-E: One-Token Entropy Regulation for Adaptive Thinking", "summary": "Researchers propose AdaThinking-E, a reinforcement learning framework that uses one-token entropy regulation to enable multimodal large language models to adaptively decide when to engage in deep reasoning, reducing computational overhead on simple tasks while maintaining accuracy on complex ones. The method, detailed in arXiv:2608.26141v1, allows models to intrinsically discover when to think without manual intervention or external difficulty labels.", "body_md": "arXiv:2608.26141v1 Announce Type: new\nAbstract: Multimodal large language models have demonstrated strong document reasoning capabilities by incorporating explicit thinking processes. While this capability significantly improves performance on challenging tasks, current models apply such deep reasoning uniformly to all questions, resulting in unnecessary computational overhead for simple task. This not only degrades user experience but also negatively impact accuracy on benchmark datasets. We identify the critical need for adaptive thinking mechanisms that can intelligently determine when to engage reasoning based on question complexity. To address this, we propose AdaThinking-E, a novel reinforcement learning framework that learns adaptive thinking through one-token entropy regulation. Our key insight is that model confidence in the decision to engage thinking (or not) can be quantified through entropy analysis of the predicted probability distribution at critical decision tokens. This observation motivates our entropy-governed reward mechanism: the training process naturally transitions from high-entropy exploration, where the model experiments with different thinking strategies, to low-entropy convergence with confident, generalizable decision-making policies. Crucially, this approach enables models to intrinsically discover when to think without requiring manual intervention or external difficulty labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach enables models to be both accurate on complex problems and efficient on simple ones across diverse document tasks.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/adathinking-e-one-token-entropy-regulation-for-adaptive-thinking", "canonical_source": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26141", "published_at": "2026-08-28 04:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-28 04:20:44.550806+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "machine-learning", "large-language-models", "ai-research", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["AdaThinking-E"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/adathinking-e-one-token-entropy-regulation-for-adaptive-thinking", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/adathinking-e-one-token-entropy-regulation-for-adaptive-thinking.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/adathinking-e-one-token-entropy-regulation-for-adaptive-thinking.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/adathinking-e-one-token-entropy-regulation-for-adaptive-thinking.jsonld"}}