通过重构思考环境,实现推理模型线性扩展,大幅降低计算开销。
The Markovian Thinker: Architecture-Agnostic Linear Scaling of Reasoning
- 将推理状态压缩为固定大小,打破思考长度与上下文绑定
- 在8K令牌分块中实现24K长推理,计算量仅为传统方法的1/4
- 适合需要高效长链推理的应用场景,如复杂问题求解
强化学习(RL)已成为训练生成长链思维(LongCoT)的大语言模型的有效方法。但传统RL环境的状态随推理过程无限增长,导致注意力机制需承受二次方计算开销。本文提出马尔可夫式思考(Markovian Thinking),使策略仅依赖固定大小的状态进行推理,从而将计算复杂度降至线性并保持常数内存。我们构建了Delethink环境,将推理划分为固定大小的块,在块边界重置上下文并保留简短携带信息。通过强化学习,策略学会在每块末尾生成足够支撑后续推理的文本状态。在96K平均思考长度下,使用R1-Distill 1.5B模型,该方法仅需7个H100月,而传统LongCoT-RL需27个H100月。实验表明,即使未经微调,1.5B至120B的现成模型也能零样本生成马尔可夫式轨迹,为大规模强化学习提供有效正样本。结果表明,重新设计思考环境是实现高效、可扩展推理的关键。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become a strong recipe for training reasoning LLMs that produce long chains of thought (LongCoT). Yet the standard RL "thinking environment", where the state is the prompt plus all prior reasoning tokens, makes the state unbounded and forces attention-based policies to pay quadratic compute as thoughts lengthen. We revisit the environment itself. We propose Markovian Thinking, a paradigm in which the policy advances reasoning while conditioning on a constant-size state, decoupling thinking length from context size. As an immediate consequence this yields linear compute with constant memory. We instantiate this idea with Delethink, an RL environment that structures reasoning into fixed-size chunks. Within each chunk, the model thinks as usual; at the boundary, the environment resets the context and reinitializes the prompt with a short carryover. Through RL, the policy learns to write a textual state near the end of each chunk sufficient for seamless continuation of reasoning after reset. Trained in this environment, an R1-Distill 1.5B model reasons in 8K-token chunks yet thinks up to 24K tokens, matching or surpassing LongCoT-RL trained with a 24K budget. With test-time scaling, Delethink continues to improve where LongCoT plateaus. The effect of linear compute is substantial: we empirically estimate at 96K average thinking length LongCoT-RL costs 27 H100-months vs. 7 for Delethink. Analysis at RL initialization shows off-the-shelf reasoning models (1.5B-120B) often sample Markovian traces zero-shot across diverse benchmarks, providing positive samples that make RL effective at scale. Our results show that redesigning the thinking environment is a powerful lever: it enables very long reasoning without quadratic overhead and opens a path toward efficient, scalable reasoning LLMs.
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