arXiv:2602.03814cs.AIcs.LG2026-02被引 11

用风险控制方法优化大模型推理计算预算,既省资源又保准确。

Conformal Thinking: Risk Control for Reasoning on a Compute Budget

  • 将推理预算问题转为风险控制,设定上下阈值动态停顿。
  • 在指定风险下,降低计算量并避免过早停止,提升效率。
  • 适合需要高效可靠推理的工业级应用与资源受限场景。

推理型大语言模型支持测试时扩展,随着令牌预算增加,数据集层面的准确率提升,推动自适应推理——仅在能提高可靠性时消耗令牌,并在额外计算无益时提前停止。然而,设定令牌预算及自适应阈值存在实际挑战,涉及根本性的风险-准确率权衡。本文将预算设定问题重构为风险控制,以限制误差率的同时最小化计算开销。框架引入上界阈值,在模型自信时停止推理(可能输出错误),以及一种新型参数化下界阈值,提前终止无法解决的任务实例(可能过早停止)。给定目标风险和验证集,采用无需分布假设的风险控制方法,最优设定这些停止机制。对于多重预算控制条件,引入效率损失以选择最高效的退出策略。在多种推理任务与模型上的实证结果表明,该风险控制方法在满足用户指定风险目标的前提下,通过下界阈值和集成停止机制实现显著的计算效率提升。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) enable test-time scaling, with dataset-level accuracy improving as the token budget increases, motivating adaptive reasoning -- spending tokens when they improve reliability and stopping early when additional computation is unlikely to help. However, setting the token budget, as well as the threshold for adaptive reasoning, is a practical challenge that entails a fundamental risk-accuracy trade-off. We re-frame the budget setting problem as risk control, limiting the error rate while minimizing compute. Our framework introduces an upper threshold that stops reasoning when the model is confident (risking incorrect output) and a novel parametric lower threshold that preemptively stops unsolvable instances (risking premature stoppage). Given a target risk and a validation set, we use distribution-free risk control to optimally specify these stopping mechanisms. For scenarios with multiple budget controlling criteria, we incorporate an efficiency loss to select the most computationally efficient exiting mechanism. Empirical results across diverse reasoning tasks and models demonstrate the effectiveness of our risk control approach, demonstrating computational efficiency gains from the lower threshold and ensemble stopping mechanisms while adhering to the user-specified risk target.

推理优化风险控制计算效率

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。