Thinking by Subtraction: Confidence-Driven Contrastive Decoding for LLM Reasoning

Lexiang Tang, Weihao Gao, Bingchen Zhao, Lu Ma, Qiao Jin, Bang Yang, Yuexian Zou

Getting Started

1. Create the environment and install the dependencies by running:

conda create -n ccd python=3.10 -y
conda activate ccd
pip install torch numpy transformers==4.56.1

2. Run with huggingface

python ccd.py

TODO

1. More models
2. CCD on VLM

Method

Main results

BibTeX

@misc{tang2026thinkingsubtractionconfidencedrivencontrastive,
      title={Thinking by Subtraction: Confidence-Driven Contrastive Decoding for LLM Reasoning}, 
      author={Lexiang Tang and Weihao Gao and Bingchen Zhao and Lu Ma and Qiao jin and Bang Yang and Yuexian Zou},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2602.18232},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18232}, 
}