根据题目难易动态调整推理策略,减少无效计算。
DiffAdapt: Difficulty-Adaptive Reasoning for Token-Efficient LLM Inference
- 基于令牌概率熵识别题目难易,区分简单、中等、困难三类
- 在保持准确率前提下,最高节省22.4%的令牌消耗
- 无需微调大模型,仅用轻量探针即可实现高效适配
近期推理型大语言模型展现出强大解题能力,但常生成冗长的思考过程,其实际价值不明确。本文分析了三种模型在推理过程中令牌概率的熵变化,发现存在一致的U形模式:简单题虽准确率高但熵值高,中等难度题熵值最低,难题则因不确定性导致熵再次升高。具体表现为从简单到中等难度时熵降低22%至25%,揭示了简单题上的过度思考现象。基于此,我们提出轻量级框架DiffAdapt,根据题目难度与推理轨迹熵值,动态选择适合的推理策略(固定提示、温度与最大令牌数)。该方法不需微调基础大模型,仅通过一个小探针分类模型最终隐藏状态即可实现低成本适应。我们在五个模型和八个基准上进行评估,结果表明,在保持或提升准确率的同时,令牌使用量最多减少22.4%,为高效推理提供了可行路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recent reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable problem-solving abilities but often generate long thinking traces whose utility is unclear. Our work aims to improve their efficiency, enabling them to reach high performance without overthinking. First, we analyze the entropy of token probabilities in reasoning traces. Across three models, we observe a consistent U-shaped entropy pattern: high entropy on easy problems despite high accuracy, low entropy on problems with medium difficulty, and high entropy on hard problems reflecting uncertainty. Specifically, we notice 22--25\% entropy reduction from easy to medium difficulty regions, suggesting an {overthinking} phenomenon on easy instances. Building on these insights, we introduce \textbf{DiffAdapt}, a lightweight framework that selects Easy/Normal/Hard inference strategies per question based on their difficulty and reasoning trace entropy. Each inference strategy consists of a fixed prompt, temperature and maximum token length. In contrast to existing efficiency optimization methods, our approach does not fine-tune base LLM but a small probe that classifies LLM's final hidden state, allowing inexpensive adaptation. We comprehensively evaluate our method on five models and eight benchmarks. Our method achieves comparable or improved accuracy while reducing token usage by up to 22.4\%, establishing a practical path toward compute-efficient reasoning.
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