Dual-Track CoT: Budget-Aware Stepwise Guidance for Small LMs

arXiv:2604.25039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) solve many reasoning tasks via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, but smaller models (about 7 to 8B parameters) still struggle with multi-step reasoning under tight compute and token budgets. Existing test time reasoning methods such as self consistency (sampling multiple rationales and voting), Tree-of-Thoughts (search over intermediate thoughts), and critique revise loops improve performance, but often at high token