arXiv:2510.24940cs.CL2025-10NeurIPS被引 14

让大模型推理更省时又准确,靠的是隐式思维对齐技术。

SemCoT: Accelerating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning through Semantically-Aligned Implicit Tokens

  • 用对比学习的句子编码器保证隐式推理语义对齐
  • 轻量级生成器加速隐式标记生成,提升效率30%以上
  • 适合追求高效精准推理的部署场景

Chain-of-Thought(CoT)推理的冗长性限制了其在效率敏感场景的大规模应用。近期出现的隐式CoT方法将推理步骤编码于大模型隐藏状态中(称为“隐式推理”),通过减少显式标记数量并跳过部分模型组件来加速。然而现有方法面临两大挑战:(1) 隐式推理转为自然语言后与真实推理语义对齐度不足,导致性能显著下降;(2) 虽关注缩短隐式推理长度,却忽略生成单个隐式标记的耗时。为此,我们提出新型语义对齐隐式CoT框架SemCoT。针对第一点,设计对比训练的句子变换器评估隐式与显式推理间的语义一致性,并在优化过程中施加约束;针对第二点,通过知识蒸馏微调轻量语言模型构建高效隐式推理生成器,该生成器受句子变换器引导,将真实推理蒸馏为语义对齐的隐式表示,同时兼顾准确性。SemCoT是首个在生成速度和语义对齐性上联合优化的CoT加速方案。大量实验表明,相比现有最优方法,SemCoT在效率与效果上均具优势。代码见:https://github.com/YinhanHe123/SemCoT/

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The verbosity of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning hinders its mass deployment in efficiency-critical applications. Recently, implicit CoT approaches have emerged, which encode reasoning steps within LLM's hidden embeddings (termed ``implicit reasoning'') rather than explicit tokens. This approach accelerates CoT by reducing the reasoning length and bypassing some LLM components. However, existing implicit CoT methods face two significant challenges: (1) they fail to preserve the semantic alignment between the implicit reasoning (when transformed to natural language) and the ground-truth reasoning, resulting in a significant CoT performance degradation, and (2) they focus on reducing the length of the implicit reasoning; however, they neglect the considerable time cost for an LLM to generate one individual implicit reasoning token. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel semantically-aligned implicit CoT framework termed SemCoT. In particular, for the first challenge, we design a contrastively trained sentence transformer that evaluates semantic alignment between implicit and explicit reasoning, which is used to enforce semantic preservation during implicit reasoning optimization. To address the second challenge, we introduce an efficient implicit reasoning generator by finetuning a lightweight language model using knowledge distillation. This generator is guided by our sentence transformer to distill ground-truth reasoning into semantically aligned implicit reasoning, while also optimizing for accuracy. SemCoT is the first approach that enhances CoT efficiency by jointly optimizing token-level generation speed and preserving semantic alignment with ground-truth reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of SemCoT compared to state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and effectiveness. Our code can be found at https://github.com/YinhanHe123/SemCoT/.

推理加速隐式推理语义对齐大模型

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。