通过分析推理过程中的隐状态变化,高效预测正确解题路径。
Tracing the Traces: Latent Temporal Signals for Efficient and Accurate Reasoning
- 用隐状态演变特征捕捉推理过程动态
- 比传统方法减少70%令牌使用,准确率提升2.6%
- 早期即可识别优质路径,适合算力受限场景
推理模型通过增加推理时计算量(如更长的令牌预算)来提升问题求解能力。如何识别可能成功的推理路径仍是关键挑战:若能可靠预测有效路径,可显著减少无效计算并提升效率。本文提出潜轨迹信号(Latent-Trajectory signals),用于刻画模型在生成中间推理令牌过程中内部表征的时间演化。通过测量推理起点与终点间隐状态的总体变化、各中间步骤的累积变化,以及这些变化向最终状态推进的程度,我们发现该信号比跨层度量和输出置信度更能可靠预测解题准确性。当用于引导多次采样生成结果的选择时,潜轨迹信号使测试时扩展更高效,相比多数投票法,最多降低70%的令牌消耗,且平均准确率提升2.6%。此外,这些预测信号常在推理早期就出现,支持对最有前景候选路径进行早期选择和算力分配。研究不仅提供了推理时效率优化的实际策略,也从隐空间视角深化了对推理过程表征与区分的理解。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reasoning models improve their problem-solving ability through inference-time scaling, allocating more compute via longer token budgets. Identifying which reasoning traces are likely to succeed remains a key opportunity: reliably predicting productive paths can substantially reduce wasted computation and improve overall efficiency. We introduce Latent-Trajectory signals that characterize the temporal evolution of a model's internal representations during the generation of intermediate reasoning tokens. By measuring the overall change in latent representations between the start and end of reasoning, the change accumulated across intermediate steps, and the extent to which these changes advance toward the final state, we show that these signals predict solution accuracy more reliably than both cross-layer metrics and output-based confidence measures. When used to guide answer selection across multiple sampled generations, Latent-Trajectory signals make test-time scaling more effective and efficient than majority voting, reducing token usage by up to 70% while preserving and even improving accuracy by 2.6% on average. Moreover, these predictive signals often emerge early in the reasoning trace, enabling early selection and allocation of compute to the most promising candidates. Our findings contribute not only practical strategies for inference-time efficiency, but also a deeper interpretability perspective on how reasoning processes are represented and differentiated in latent space.
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