Prefix Sliding: discarding stale reasoning tokens makes test-time scaling 3x faster

Bedrovelsen · x · 2026-08-27

A new paper proposes Prefix Sliding: most intermediate reasoning tokens lose importance as the model continues reasoning, so retaining the full history may not be worth the cost. The method keeps only the prefix plus a sliding window of the last few thousand tokens.

Results: without training, existing models run 3x faster with maintained performance; training with Prefix Sliding via RL enables scaling to reasoning traces beyond 100k tokens for even better results. Code is open-sourced.

Related event: Prefix Sliding Speeds Up Inference 3x by Dropping Stale Tokens(2 posts)→

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