arXiv:2510.02312cs.LG2025-10被引 11

用压缩键值缓存蒸馏知识,让模型更高效地进行隐式推理。

KaVa: Latent Reasoning via Compressed KV-Cache Distillation

  • 通过自蒸馏将教师模型的压缩键值缓存作为监督信号
  • 在自然语言推理上比现有隐式推理方法提升显著,且误差更小
  • 适合需要高效部署的大模型推理场景

大语言模型在多步推理任务中表现优异,依赖显式的思维链(CoT),但其冗长的推理过程带来巨大计算开销和内存负担,且常含冗余与风格化内容。隐式推理作为高效替代方案,可内化思考过程,但缺乏有效监督,导致在复杂自然语言推理中表现受限。本文提出KaVa,首个通过自蒸馏方式,将教师模型压缩键值缓存中的抽象知识直接传递给隐式推理学生模型的框架。利用连续隐向量的表征灵活性,对齐每一步的键值轨迹。实验证明,尽管压缩键值缓存中无直接词元对应关系,其内部抽象、非结构化的知识仍可作为丰富的监督信号。该方法在多个基准上持续优于强基线,在从仅公式到自然语言推理的转换中退化显著更小,并可扩展至更大模型,同时保持高效性。结果表明,压缩键值缓存蒸馏是隐式推理的可扩展监督信号,兼具CoT教师的准确性与隐式推理的效率与可部署性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning problems with explicit chain-of-thought (CoT), but verbose traces incur significant computational costs and memory overhead, and often carry redundant, stylistic artifacts. Latent reasoning has emerged as an efficient alternative that internalizes the thought process, but it suffers from a critical lack of supervision, limiting its effectiveness on complex, natural-language reasoning traces. In this work we propose KaVa, the first framework that bridges this gap by distilling knowledge directly from a compressed KV-cache of the teacher into a latent-reasoning student via self-distillation, leveraging the representational flexibility of continuous latent tokens to align stepwise KV trajectories. We show that the abstract, unstructured knowledge within compressed KV-cache, which lacks direct token correspondence, can serve as a rich supervisory signal for a latent reasoning student. Empirically, the approach consistently outperforms strong latent baselines, exhibits markedly smaller degradation from equation-only to natural-language traces, and scales to larger backbones while preserving efficiency. These results establish compressed KV-cache distillation as a scalable supervision signal for latent reasoning, combining the accuracy of CoT-trained teachers with the efficiency and deployability of latent inference.

隐式推理知识蒸馏大模型优化推理效率

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