Are More Tokens Rational? Inference-Time Scaling in Language Models as Adaptive Resource Rationality
arXiv:2602.10329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human reasoning is shaped by resource rationality — optimizing performance under constraints. Recently, inference-time scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm to improve the reasoning performance of Large Language Models by expanding test-time computation. Specifically, instruction-tuned (IT) models explicitly generate long reasoning steps during inference, whereas Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are trained by reinforcement learning to discover reasoning paths that maximize accuracy. However, it remains unclear whether resource-rationality can emerge from such scaling […]