Wait, Do We Need to Wait? Revisiting Budget Forcing for Sequential Test-Time Scaling

摘要

In this blog post, we revisit the technique of ***budget forcing*** — a sequential test-time scaling technique that controls reasoning budget in reasoning models by appending a "Wait" keyword (or equivalently forcing a stop when the budget is exceeded), thereby determining whether the model continues thinking or directly outputs an answer. We explore three main questions: 1. To what extent does budget-forcing generalize across different model families and settings? 2. Does it work with non-reasoning models? 3. Can other keywords serve the same function as "Wait"? We present experimental results, including cases where budget forcing does and does *not* help and offer practical guidance for applying budget-forcing in test-time scaling.