arXiv:2509.20868cs.LGcs.AI2025-09被引 6

对比五种推理风格,发现复杂结构并非总是更优。

StyleBench: Evaluating thinking styles in Large Language Models

  • 将推理风格视为资源受限的设计选择,而非固定流程。
  • 复杂风格仅在特定任务和模型规模下提升准确率。
  • 小模型易提前猜测,学习自适应选风格更有效。

结构化推理可提升大语言模型的推理性能,但伴随计算开销和控制约束。何时结构化推理有益、何时反而降低效率或鲁棒性仍不明确。我们提出StyleBench,将推理结构视为容量受限的设计选择而非固定推理范式。在五个推理任务和15个开源LLM(参数量270M至120B)上评估五种代表性推理风格:Chain-of-Thought、Tree-of-Thought、Algorithm-of-Thought、Sketch-of-Thought和Chain-of-Draft。结果表明,更高结构复杂度仅在任务需求与模型容量匹配时提升准确率。基于搜索的风格在开放性组合问题中有效,但在小模型上失效;简洁风格在结构化任务中实现显著效率提升且不牺牲性能。还发现小模型存在系统性失败模式,如提前猜测和弱遵循推理控制指令。进一步比较Qwen-7B-Instruct上监督与强化学习驱动的策略选择,监督微调退化为浅层风格偏好,而GRPO学习到更强的自适应控制并提升下游表现。这些结果阐明了结构化推理的适用边界,并揭示学习选择推理策略本身即为复杂推理任务。基准代码已开源:https://github.com/JamesJunyuGuo/Style_Bench。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Structured reasoning can improve the inference performance of large language models (LLMs), but it also introduces computational cost and control constraints. When additional reasoning structure helps, and when it instead reduces efficiency or robustness, remains poorly understood. We propose StyleBench, where we study reasoning structure as a capacity-constrained design choice rather than a fixed inference recipe. We evaluate five representative reasoning styles: Chain-of-Thought, Tree-of-Thought, Algorithm-of-Thought, Sketch-of-Thought, and Chain-of-Draft across five reasoning tasks and 15 open-source LLMs ranging from 270M to 120B parameters. We find that greater structural complexity improves accuracy only in limited regimes defined by task demands and model capacity. Search-based styles help on open-ended combinatorial problems but fail on smaller models, while concise styles achieve large efficiency gains on structured tasks without sacrificing performance. We also identify systematic failure modes in smaller models, including premature guessing and weak adherence to reasoning-control instructions. To study adaptive reasoning control, we further compare supervised and reinforcement-based strategy selection on Qwen-7B-Instruct. Supervised fine-tuning collapses to shallow style preferences, whereas GRPO learns stronger adaptive control and improves downstream performance. Together, these results clarify when structured reasoning is useful, when it is wasteful, and why learning to choose a reasoning strategy is itself a challenging inference problem, we open source the benchmark in https://github.com/JamesJunyuGuo/Style_Bench.

推理风格大模型效率优化自适应控制

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