让大模型对简单题压缩答案,对难题保留探索空间,提升推理效率。
Compress the Easy, Explore the Hard: Difficulty-Aware Entropy Regularization for Efficient LLM Reasoning
- 根据题目难易动态调节熵正则化,难题保多样性,易题可压缩。
- 在6个基准上减少响应长度,准确率接近基础模型,且优于单纯压缩方法。
- 适合需要高效推理又不牺牲准确率的落地场景,如智能客服、教育工具。
思维链(Chain-of-Thought, CoT)显著提升了大语言模型解决复杂推理任务的能力,但显式推理步骤的冗长带来了高昂的推理延迟和计算成本,限制了实际部署。现有压缩方法(如自训练或带长度约束的强化学习)虽能减轻负担,却常以牺牲推理能力为代价。我们发现这些方法的关键缺陷在于:过度优化短路径会引发熵快速坍缩,过早压缩探索空间,尤其阻碍对需深度推导难题的有效求解。为此,我们提出“压缩简单题,探索难题”(CEEH)方法,一种基于难度感知的强化学习高效推理框架。该方法动态评估实例难度,对困难问题施加选择性熵正则化,以维持多样化的搜索空间;对简单问题则允许激进压缩。此外,引入基于历史最短正确回答的动态最优长度惩罚项,有效抑制熵导致的长度膨胀,稳定奖励信号。在六个推理基准测试中,CEEH持续减少响应长度,同时保持与基线模型相当的准确率,并在Pass@k指标上优于仅优化长度的方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has substantially empowered Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex reasoning tasks, yet the verbose nature of explicit reasoning steps incurs prohibitive inference latency and computational costs, limiting real-world deployment. While existing compression methods - ranging from self-training to Reinforcement Learning (RL) with length constraints - attempt to mitigate this, they often sacrifice reasoning capability for brevity. We identify a critical failure mode in these approaches: explicitly optimizing for shorter trajectories triggers rapid entropy collapse, which prematurely shrinks the exploration space and stifles the discovery of valid reasoning paths, particularly for challenging questions requiring extensive deduction. To address this issue, we propose Compress responses for Easy questions and Explore Hard ones (CEEH), a difficulty-aware approach to RL-based efficient reasoning. CEEH dynamically assesses instance difficulty to apply selective entropy regularization: it preserves a diverse search space for currently hard questions to ensure robustness, while permitting aggressive compression on easier instances where the reasoning path is well-established. In addition, we introduce a dynamic optimal-length penalty anchored to the historically shortest correct response, which effectively counteracts entropy-induced length inflation and stabilizes the reward signal. Across six reasoning benchmarks, CEEH consistently reduces response length while maintaining accuracy comparable to the base model, and improves Pass@k relative to length-only optimization.
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