Thinking Inertia: LLMs Keep Reasoning Even When Told Not To

A NeurIPS 2026 paper from Tsinghua, Oxford and Stanford reveals "Thinking Inertia": even when explicitly told not to think, LLMs keep emitting reasoning in their outputs, especially on open-ended questions where this occurs in 99.9% of cases.

2026-10-09 ~ 2026-10-10 · 2 related posts

• NeurIPS paper: LLMs keep thinking even when explicitly told not to — james_y_zou · 2026-10-09
• Thinking Inertia: LLMs keep reasoning in 99.9% of open-ended answers even with thinking off — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-10-10