Trace Length is a Simple Uncertainty Signal in Reasoning Models

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission22162 Authors

Keywords: Calibration, Uncertainty quantification, reasoning models, uncertainty, confidence

TL;DR: We show that in reasoning models, trace length is a competitive zero-shot uncertainty quantification method.

Abstract: Uncertainty quantification for LLMs is a key research direction towards addressing hallucination and other issues that limit their reliable deployment. In this work, we show that reasoning trace length is a simple and useful confidence estimator in large reasoning models. Through comprehensive experiments across multiple models, datasets, and prompts, we show that trace length performs in comparable but complementary ways to other zero-shot confidence estimators such as verbalized confidence. Our work reveals that reasoning post-training fundamentally alters the relationship between trace length and accuracy, going beyond prior work that had shown that post-training causes traces to grow longer in general (e.g., "overthinking"). We investigate the mechanisms behind trace length's performance as a confidence signal, observing that the effect remains even after adjusting for confounders such as problem difficulty and GRPO-induced length bias. We identify high-entropy or ``forking’’ tokens as playing a key role in the mechanism. Our findings demonstrate that reasoning post-training enhances uncertainty quantification beyond verbal expressions, and establish trace length as a practical confidence measure for large reasoning models.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 22162