arXiv:2605.17672cs.CL2026-05被引 6

让推理模型在思路稳定时提前退出,节省算力且不丢准确率。

Stop When Reasoning Converges: Semantic-Preserving Early Exit for Reasoning Models

论文配图:Stop When Reasoning Converges: Semantic-Preserving Early Exit for Reasoning Models
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 通过检测推理步骤中的语义冗余判断是否收敛,决定何时提前退出。
  • 在5个模型、5个基准上平均减少26.2%的令牌消耗,准确率不变。
  • 适用于代码生成、视觉语言推理等场景,可直接部署提升效率。

大型推理模型(LRMs)通过生成长链思维(CoT)实现优异性能,但常过度思考,在解决方案已稳定后仍持续推理,浪费计算资源并增加延迟。现有推理阶段提前退出方法主要依赖答案层面信号(如置信度或答案一致性),但这些信号反映的是答案准备就绪程度,而非推理过程收敛:可能在模型尚未完成探索或自我修正前就触发退出,导致提前终止,降低最终答案准确率,并使保留的推理链语义不完整。本文识别出推理层级的语义冗余是一种互补信号:当连续步骤不再引入新进展,而是重复已有结论时,推理轨迹很可能已收敛。基于此,我们提出PUMA——一种即插即用框架,结合轻量级冗余检测器与答案级验证机制。检测器标记语义冗余的候选退出点,验证模块确认停止是否安全,从而在保留答案准确率和连贯推理前缀的同时,移除冗余后续步骤。在五个大型推理模型和五个高难度推理基准上的实验表明,PUMA实现了26.2%的平均令牌减少,同时保持准确率与保留的推理质量。在代码生成、零样本视觉-语言推理及学习型停止策略内化等任务上的额外实验进一步证明,推理层级冗余是鲁棒、可迁移且可学习的高效推理信号。代码已开源。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong performance by generating long chains of thought (CoT), but often overthink, continuing to reason after a solution has already stabilized and thereby wasting tokens and increasing latency. Existing inference-time early-exit methods rely primarily on answer-level signals, such as confidence or trial-answer consistency, to decide when to stop. However, these signals mainly reflect answer readiness rather than reasoning convergence: they may trigger before the model has finished exploring or self-correcting, causing premature exits that can degrade final-answer accuracy and leave the retained reasoning chain semantically incomplete. We identify reasoning-level semantic redundancy as a complementary signal for semantic-preserving early exit: when successive steps no longer add novel progress and instead revisit established conclusions, the reasoning trajectory has likely converged. Building on this insight, we propose PUMA, a plug-and-play framework that combines a lightweight Redundancy Detector with answer-level verification. The detector flags semantically redundant candidate exits, while verification confirms whether stopping is safe, allowing PUMA to remove redundant continuation while preserving both answer accuracy and a coherent reasoning prefix. Across five LRMs and five challenging reasoning benchmarks, PUMA achieves 26.2% average token reduction while preserving accuracy and retained CoT quality. Additional experiments on code generation, zero-shot vision-language reasoning, and learned stopping-policy internalization further demonstrate that reasoning-level redundancy is a robust, transferable, and learnable signal for efficient reasoning. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/giovanni-vaccarino/PUMA}.

推理优化提前退出思维链高效推理

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。