不经过思考过程的简单提示也能高效推理,尤其适合低算力场景。
Reasoning Models Can Be Effective Without Thinking
- 用简单提示绕过显式思考步骤,直接生成答案
- 700令牌下在ACM 23上达51.3分,远超传统思考模式的28.9
- 通过并行生成多答案并聚合,适合低延迟或资源受限应用
近期大模型通过引入冗长的显式思考过程显著提升了推理能力。本文质疑这一设计是否必要。基于DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen模型,我们发现采用无需思考的简单提示(NoThinking)在控制令牌数的前提下,在七个挑战性推理数据集上表现更优,涵盖数学求解、形式定理证明和编程任务。尤其在低预算设置中,如700令牌下,其在ACM 23上的得分达51.3,远超思考模式的28.9。值得注意的是,随着pass@k中的k增大,NoThinking性能更具竞争力。在此基础上,我们提出一种并行扩展方法:独立生成N个输出后,利用任务特定验证器或简单的置信度选择等最佳-N策略进行聚合。该方法在与思考模式相似延迟下超越多个基线,且性能接近需长达9倍延迟的思考模式。研究呼吁重新评估冗长思考的必要性,并为低预算或低延迟场景下的强推理提供有效基准。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recent LLMs have significantly improved reasoning capabilities, primarily by including an explicit, lengthy Thinking process as part of generation. In this paper, we question whether this explicit thinking is necessary. Using the state-of-the-art DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen, we find that bypassing the thinking process via simple prompting, denoted as NoThinking, can be surprisingly effective. When controlling for the number of tokens, NoThinking outperforms Thinking across a diverse set of seven challenging reasoning datasets--including mathematical problem solving, formal theorem proving, and coding--especially in low-budget settings, e.g., 51.3 vs. 28.9 on ACM 23 with 700 tokens. Notably, the performance of NoThinking becomes more competitive with pass@k as k increases. Building on this observation, we demonstrate that a parallel scaling approach that uses NoThinking to generate N outputs independently and aggregates them is highly effective. For aggregation, we use task-specific verifiers when available, or we apply simple best-of-N strategies such as confidence-based selection. Our method outperforms a range of baselines with similar latency using Thinking, and is comparable to Thinking with significantly longer latency (up to 9x). Together, our research encourages a reconsideration of the necessity of lengthy thinking processes, while also establishing a competitive reference for achieving strong reasoning performance in low-budget settings or at low latency using parallel scaling.
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