arXiv:2504.20708cs.CLcs.AI2025-04被引 18

分析推理过程中间步骤,能发现比最终答案更准的解法。

Beyond the Last Answer: Your Reasoning Trace Uncovers More than You Think

  • 将推理过程拆分为子思考片段,从每个片段续写并提取答案。
  • 汇总多个子思考得出的答案,准确率提升最高达13%。
  • 可识别模型信心不足的结论,适合改进推理评估方法。

大型语言模型通过逐步推理解决复杂问题。传统评估只关注最终答案,本文质疑其可靠性,提出新方法:将推理过程按语言线索分割为连续子思考片段,从每个片段末尾生成后续内容,并提取对应的潜在答案。通过统计各子思考生成答案的众数,显著提升准确率,在AIME2024和AIME2025数据集上分别提升最高达13%和10%。分析不同子思考结果的一致性,发现其与模型信心和正确性相关,有助于识别不可靠答案。代码已开源。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large Language Models (LLMs) leverage step-by-step reasoning to solve complex problems. Standard evaluation practice involves generating a complete reasoning trace and assessing the correctness of the final answer presented at its conclusion. In this paper, we challenge the reliance on the final answer by posing the following two questions: Does the final answer reliably represent the model's optimal conclusion? Can alternative reasoning paths yield different results? To answer these questions, we analyze intermediate reasoning steps, termed subthoughts, and propose a method based on our findings. Our approach involves segmenting a reasoning trace into sequential subthoughts based on linguistic cues. We start by prompting the model to generate continuations from the end-point of each intermediate subthought. We extract a potential answer from every completed continuation originating from different subthoughts. We find that aggregating these answers by selecting the most frequent one (the mode) often yields significantly higher accuracy compared to relying solely on the answer derived from the original complete trace. Analyzing the consistency among the answers derived from different subthoughts reveals characteristics that correlate with the model's confidence and correctness, suggesting potential for identifying less reliable answers. Our experiments across various LLMs and challenging mathematical reasoning datasets (AIME2024 and AIME2025) show consistent accuracy improvements, with gains reaching up to 13\% and 10\% respectively. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/hammoudhasan/SubthoughtReasoner.

推理分析LLM评估数学推理子思考

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