让大模型推理更短更准,自动适应难题和能力变化
ExpThink: Experience-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Chain-of-Thought Compression

- 用经验引导奖励,自动调整压缩难度
- 压缩长度最高减少77%,准确率还提升
- 适合追求高效精准推理的场景
大型推理模型虽通过长链式思维(CoT)表现优异,但存在令牌消耗过多和推理延迟高的问题。现有基于强化学习的压缩方法依赖固定长度惩罚,忽视模型能力动态和题目难度差异。本文提出ExpThink框架,通过两项互补机制解决该问题:首先,经验引导奖励设计跟踪每道题最短正确解,给予简洁正确回答全分、冗长正确回答减分、错误回答零分,阈值随模型进步自动收紧,形成无需人工调度的自进化课程;其次,难度自适应优势计算将标准差归一化替换为正确答案计数归一化,生成单调递增的难度梯度,增强对难题的学习,抑制简单题的梯度,从而在保证准确率的同时鼓励简洁表达。实验表明,ExpThink在多个数学推理基准上将平均响应长度降低最高达77%,同时提升准确率,准确率-效率比(准确率除以平均令牌数)达到基线3倍,优于现有基于强化学习的压缩方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance via extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet suffer from excessive token consumption and high inference latency. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for CoT compression rely on uniform, static length penalties that neglect model capability dynamics and problem-level difficulty variation. We propose \textbf{ExpThink}\xspace, an RL framework that addresses both dimensions through two complementary mechanisms. First, \emph{experience-guided reward shaping} tracks the shortest correct solution found so far for each problem and applies a three-tier reward: full credit for concise correct responses, discounted credit for verbose correct ones, and zero for incorrect ones. The threshold tightens automatically with model improvement, forming a self-evolving curriculum that requires no manual scheduling. Second, \emph{difficulty-adaptive advantage} replaces standard deviation normalization with correct-count normalization, yielding monotonically difficulty-scaled gradients that amplify learning on hard problems to preserve accuracy while suppressing gradients on easy ones to encourage brevity. Together, these mechanisms enforce an accuracy-first, compression-second training objective. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that \textbf{ExpThink}\xspace reduces average response length by up to 77\% while simultaneously improving accuracy, achieving up to $3\times$ higher accuracy-efficiency ratio (accuracy divided by average token count) than the vanilla baseline and outperforming existing RL-based compression methods on both metrics.
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