FROST: Filtering Reasoning Outliers with Attention for Efficient Reasoning
Haozheng Luo, Zhuolin Jiang, Md Zahid Hasan, Yan Chen, Soumalya Sarkar
Abstract
We propose **FROST**, an attention-aware method for efficient reasoning. Unlike traditional approaches, FROST leverages attention weights to prune uncritical reasoning paths, yielding shorter and more reliable reasoning trajectories. Methodologically, we introduce the concept of *reasoning outliers* and design an attention-based mechanism to remove them. Theoretically, FROST preserves and enhances the model’s reasoning capacity while eliminating outliers at the sentence level. Empirically, we validate FROST on four benchmarks using two strong reasoning models (Phi-4-Reasoning and GPT-oss-20B), outperforming state-of-the-art methods such as TALE and ThinkLess. Notably, FROST achieves an average **69.68%** reduction in token usage and a **26.70%** improvement in accuracy over the base model. Furthermore, in evaluations of attention outlier metrics, FROST reduces the maximum infinity norm $\||\mathbf{x}\||_{\infty}$ by **15.97%** and the average kurtosis by **91.09%** compared to the base model.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
luo2026frost,
title={{FROST}: Filtering Reasoning Outliers with Attention for Efficient Reasoning},
author={Haozheng Luo and Zhuolin Jiang and Md Zahid Hasan and Yan Chen and Soumalya Sarkar},
booktitle={The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=a9dngZLqGS}
}