用神经元激活值动态调整推理样本数,大幅降低大模型推理开销。
Breaking the Pre-Sampling Barrier: Activation-Informed Difficulty-Aware Self-Consistency
- 利用前馈网络激活值构建轻量难度探针,无需额外采样
- 在5个数据集上实现相同精度下推理成本降低40%以上
- 可直接迁移至新数据集,免去预采样步骤
自一致性(Self-Consistency, SC)通过生成多个思维链路径并以多数投票选出答案,有效提升大语言模型的推理能力,但需大量采样导致推理成本高昂。为缓解此问题,难度自适应自一致性(DSC)根据题目难易程度动态调整采样数量,减少简单问题的冗余计算。然而,DSC需额外模型调用与预采样来估计难度,且每次更换数据集均需重复该过程,带来显著计算开销。本文提出激活信息驱动的难度感知自一致性(ACTSC),利用前馈网络神经元激活值作为内部难度信号,构建轻量级难度估计探针,无需额外生成 token 或调用模型。该探针可动态调节 SC 的采样数量,并直接应用于新数据集而无需预采样。在五个基准测试上的实验表明,ACTSC在保持与现有方法相当准确率的同时,显著降低了推理成本。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Self-Consistency (SC) is an effective decoding strategy that improves the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by generating multiple chain-of-thought reasoning paths and selecting the final answer via majority voting. However, it suffers from substantial inference costs because it requires a large number of samples. To mitigate this issue, Difficulty-Adaptive Self-Consistency (DSC) was proposed to reduce unnecessary token usage for easy problems by adjusting the number of samples according to problem difficulty. However, DSC requires additional model calls and pre-sampling to estimate difficulty, and this process is repeated when applying to each dataset, leading to significant computational overhead. In this work, we propose Activation-Informed Difficulty-Aware Self-Consistency (ACTSC) to address these limitations. ACTSC leverages internal difficulty signals reflected in the feed-forward network neuron activations to construct a lightweight difficulty estimation probe, without any additional token generation or model calls. The probe dynamically adjusts the number of samples for SC and can be applied to new datasets without requiring pre-sampling for difficulty estimation. To validate its effectiveness, we conduct experiments on five benchmarks. Experimental results show that ACTSC effectively reduces inference costs while maintaining accuracy relative to existing methods.
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