TIME: Temporally Intelligent Meta-reasoning Engine for Context Triggered Explicit Reasoning

Abstract: Reasoning oriented LLMs often expose explicit "thinking" as long, turn-global traces at the start of every response, either always on or toggled externally at inference time. While useful for arithmetic, programming, and problem solving, this design is costly, blurs claim level auditability, and cannot re-trigger explicit reasoning once the model begins presenting. Dialogue models are also largely blind to temporal structure, treating replies after seconds and replies after weeks as equivalent unless time is stated in text. We introduce TIME, the Temporally Intelligent Meta-reasoning Engine, a behavioral alignment framework that treats explicit reasoning as a context sensitive resource driven by discourse and temporal cues. TIME augments dialogue with optional ISO 8601 <time> tags, tick turns that represent silent gaps, and short > blocks that can appear anywhere in a reply. A four-phase curriculum including a small, maximally diverse full-batch alignment step trains Qwen3 dense models to invoke brief, in-place reasoning bursts and keep user facing text compact. We evaluate with TIMEBench, a temporally grounded dialogue benchmark probing chronology, commonsense under gaps and offsets, anomaly detection, and continuity. Across 4B to 32B scales, TIME improves TIMEBench scores over base Qwen3 in both thinking and no-thinking modes while reducing reasoning tokens by about an order of magnitude. Our training data and code are available at https://github.com/The-Coherence-Initiative/TIME and TIMEBench is available at https://github.com/The-Coherence-Initiative/TIMEBench