arXiv:2605.14098stat.MLcs.CL2026-05

用校准方法提升思维链推理的可信度,错误率可控且可主动放弃不确定问题。

Pause and Reflect: Conformal Aggregation for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

论文配图:Pause and Reflect: Conformal Aggregation for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用加权得分聚合替代多数投票,结合置信度控制决定是否回答。
  • 在GSM8K上仅放弃5%题目就达到90.1%精准率,远超传统方法。
  • 无需训练,全在推理时完成,适用于任何思维链模型。

思维链推理通过聚合多个采样路径提升性能,但正确性依赖于聚合规则而非单一路径,导致聚合不确定性成为核心挑战。尤其当自信错误答案代价高昂时,该问题更显关键。本文提出一种针对思维链推理的保形程序,将多数投票替换为基于路径得分的加权聚合,并利用保形风险控制校准弃权策略。该方法对高置信错误率(系统回答且出错的概率)提供有限样本保证。进一步识别出得分可分性是弃权能提升选择性准确率的关键条件,并推导出仅凭校准数据即可预测精度提升的闭式表达式。方法完全在推理阶段执行,无需重新训练。在四个基准、四种开源模型及三类得分体系下,实际高置信错误率与设定目标一致,误差源于校准与测试集波动。在GSM8K上,通过放弃不足5%的问题,实现90.1%的选择性准确率,优于多数投票基线的82%。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning with self-consistency improves performance by aggregating multiple sampled reasoning paths. In this setting, correctness is no longer tied to a single reasoning trace but to the aggregation rule over a pool of candidate paths, making aggregation uncertainty the central challenge. This issue is critical where confidently incorrect answers are far more costly than abstentions. We introduce a conformal procedure for CoT reasoning that directly addresses aggregation uncertainty. Our approach replaces majority voting with weighted score aggregation over reasoning paths and calibrates an abstention rule using conformal risk control. This approach leads to finite-sample guarantees on the confident-error rate--the probability that the system answers and is wrong. We further identify score separability as the key condition under which abstention provably improves selective accuracy, and derive closed-form expressions that predict accuracy gains from calibration data alone. The method is fully inference-time, and requires no retraining. Across four benchmarks, four open-source models, and three score classes, realized confident-error rates are consistent with the prescribed targets up to calibration-split and test-set variability. Our method achieves $90.1\%$ selective accuracy on GSM8K by abstaining on less than $5\%$ of problems, compared with $82\%$ accuracy under majority-voting baseline.

思维链置信度校准推理优化保形推理

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