通过干预注意力头,让大模型推理更准更快。
Understanding and Steering the Cognitive Behaviors of Reasoning Models at Test-Time
- 识别推理中的认知头,用向量调控思维路径。
- 测试时提升准确率最高17.5%,减少37.6%的token消耗。
- 无需训练,适配多种模型与任务,提升推理效率。
大型语言模型(LLMs)常依赖长链式思维(CoT)解决复杂任务。然而,这些推理轨迹往往效率低下,导致高延迟或不稳定推理,表现为过度思考(重复冗余)或思考不足(浅层不一致)。本文研究推理轨迹结构,发现特定注意力头与验证、回溯等认知行为相关。通过在推理时轻量干预这些头,可引导模型避开低效模式。基于此提出CREST——一种无需训练的测试时认知推理调控方法。CREST包含离线校准(识别认知头并生成调控向量)和推理时旋转隐藏表示以抑制无效成分两个阶段。该方法自适应抑制无效推理,提升准确率同时降低计算开销。在多个推理基准与模型上,准确率最高提升17.5%,token使用减少37.6%,为实现更快更可靠的LLM推理提供简单有效路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large Language Models (LLMs) often rely on long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex tasks. While effective, these trajectories are frequently inefficient, leading to high latency from excessive token generation, or unstable reasoning that alternates between underthinking (shallow, inconsistent steps) and overthinking (repetitive, verbose reasoning). In this work, we study the structure of reasoning trajectories and uncover specialized attention heads that correlate with distinct cognitive behaviors such as verification and backtracking. By lightly intervening on these heads at inference time, we can steer the model away from inefficient modes. Building on this insight, we propose CREST, a training-free method for Cognitive REasoning Steering at Test-time. CREST has two components: (1) an offline calibration step that identifies cognitive heads and derives head-specific steering vectors, and (2) an inference-time procedure that rotates hidden representations to suppress components along those vectors. CREST adaptively suppresses unproductive reasoning behaviors, yielding both higher accuracy and lower computational cost. Across diverse reasoning benchmarks and models, CREST improves accuracy by up to 17.5% while reducing token usage by 37.6%, offering a simple and effective pathway to faster, more reliable LLM reasoning.
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