Paper · arXiv 2506.12860
QFFT, Question-Free Fine-Tuning for Adaptive Reasoning
Wanlong Liu, Junxiao Xu, Fei Yu, Yukang Lin, Ke Ji, Wenyu Chen, Yan Xu, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Benyou Wang
Question-Free Fine-Tuning (QFFT) improves efficiency and adaptability in cognitive models by leveraging both short and long chain-of-thought patterns, reducing response length while maintaining performance across various scenarios.
Abstract
Recent advancements in Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning models have improved performance on complex tasks, but they suffer from overthinking, which generates redundant reasoning steps, especially for simple questions. This paper revisits the reasoning patterns of Long and Short CoT models, observing that the Short CoT patterns offer concise reasoning efficiently, while the Long CoT patterns excel in challenging scenarios where the Short CoT patterns struggle. To enable models to leverage both patterns, we propose Question-Free Fine-Tuning (QFFT), a fine-tuning approach that removes the input question during training and learns exclusively from Long CoT responses. This approach enables the model to adaptively employ both reasoning patterns: it prioritizes the Short CoT patterns and activates the Long CoT patterns only when necessary. Experiments on various mathematical datasets demonstrate that QFFT reduces average response length by more than 50\%, while achieving performance comparable to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Additionally, QFFT exhibits superior performance compared to SFT in noisy, out-of-domain, and low-resource scenarios.