{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Adaptive GoGI-Skip: Coupling Goal-Gradient Importance with Dynamic Uncertainty for Efficient Reasoning","authors":[{"name":"Ren Zhuang","slug":"ren-zhuang","given":"Ren","family":"Zhuang","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting trades inference speed for reasoning accuracy. Existing compressors force a compromise as static gradient techniques treat tokens independently, severing sequential logic, while uncertainty-based pruning ignores the final answer. We introduce Adaptive GoGI-Skip, a framework that resolves this tension by non-linearly coupling Goal-Gradient Importance (GoGI) with Adaptive Dynamic Skipping (ADS). GoGI quantifies each token's functional contribution to answer correctness via gradient sensitivity. ADS leverages runtime entropy to dynamically modulate the GoGI threshold, preserving low-gradient tokens essential for structural coherence at high-uncertainty junctions. Trained on 7,472 MATH traces, our policy transfers zero-shot to AIME, GPQA, and GSM8K, reducing token volume by >45% and accelerating inference up to 2.0x without accuracy loss. These results suggest that thinking-optimal compression demands synergy between teleological goals and epistemic uncertainty.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2026/457","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/457","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/0457.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/457.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/bibtex/457","volume":{"slug":"2026","title":"Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2026","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/","year":2026,"location":"Bremen, Germany","dates":"15-21 August 2026","editors":"Diego Calvanese","isbn":"978-1-956792-09-6","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2026"},"section":"Knowledge Representation and Reasoning","track":"Main Track","number":457,"pages":{"first":4106,"last":4114},"keywords":["Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Learning and reasoning","Machine Learning: Optimization","Natural Language Processing: Language models","Natural Language Processing: Language generation"],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}