arXiv:2602.06600cs.CL2026-02被引 2

利用大模型自动生成的重复问题作为计算资源分配锚点,提升推理准确性。

Echoes as Anchors: Probabilistic Costs and Attention Refocusing in LLM Reasoning

  • 发现模型在推理开头自发重复问题,将其称为'提示回声'并用于指导计算分配
  • 提出新指标'回声似然差'量化重复对答案质量的提升效果,验证其与准确率正相关
  • 无需训练的回声引导提示法可让模型中段重聚焦注意力,适合数学和代码推理任务

大型推理模型(LRM)在测试时的计算资源分配广泛应用于数学解题、代码生成和规划任务。现有方法通过自一致性扩展和并行思考引入通用‘思考标记’,或要求模型重新阅读问题。但这些方法要么注入无任务特性的标记,要么依赖无法解释的启发式规则,忽略了模型内部链路中常见的自发重复现象。本文分析并利用这一现象——即模型在推理起始阶段自发重复原始问题,称之为‘提示回声(EOP)’,将其作为前置的、可调控计算资源的机制。通过将回声去除建模为基于拒绝的条件化,定义了可计算的‘回声似然差’Δℒ作为理论代理指标,建立了早期重复与似然增益及下游准确率之间的联系。为进一步挖掘该机制,提出‘回声精炼微调(ED-SFT)’以在监督微调中植入‘先回声后推理’模式,并设计‘回声提示(EP)’在不训练的前提下实现推理中段的重新定位。通过控制长度和后缀的似然分析以及逐层注意力研究,发现EOP能增强中间层中答案到前缀的关注度,支持‘注意力重聚焦’机制。在GSM8K、MathQA、Hendrycks-MATH、AIME24和MATH-500数据集上,在相同解码设置和计算预算下,实验结果一致优于基线方法。代码已公开于https://github.com/hhh2210/echoes-as-anchors。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Test-time compute allocation in large reasoning models (LRMs) is widely used and has applications in mathematical problem solving, code synthesis, and planning. Recent work has addressed this problem by scaling self-consistency and parallel thinking, adding generic ``thinking tokens'' and prompting models to re-read the question before answering. Unfortunately, these approaches either inject task-agnostic tokens or mandate heuristics that do not explain -- and often ignore -- the \emph{spontaneous} repetition that many LRMs exhibit at the head of their internal chains. In contrast, we analyze and harness the model's tendency to restate the question, which we term the \emph{Echo of Prompt (EOP)}, as a front-loaded, compute-shaping mechanism. We formalize its probabilistic cost by casting echo removal as rejection-based conditioning and defining the \emph{Echo Likelihood Gap} $Δ\mathcal{L}$ as a computable proxy. This provides the missing theoretical link that links early repetition to likelihood gains and downstream accuracy. However, it does not by itself specify how to exploit EOP. Consequently, we develop \emph{Echo-Distilled SFT (ED-SFT)} to instill an ``echo-then-reason'' pattern through supervised finetuning, and \emph{Echoic Prompting (EP)} to re-ground the model mid-trace without training. While promising, quantifying benefits beyond verbosity is non-trivial. Therefore, we conduct length and suffix-controlled likelihood analyses together with layer-wise attention studies, showing that EOP increases answer to answer-prefix attention in middle layers, consistent with an \emph{attention refocusing} mechanism. We evaluate on GSM8K, MathQA, Hendrycks-MATH, AIME24, and MATH-500 under identical decoding settings and budgets, and find consistent gains over baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/hhh2210/echoes-as-anchors.

大模型推理注意力机制计算分配提示工程

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