让大模型推理更高效:只压缩冗余步骤,关键步骤仍保留原文。
Selective Latent Thinking: Adaptive Compression of LLM Reasoning Chains

- 按可信度选择性压缩推理过程,关键步骤不丢精度。
- 在数学推理任务中,准确率比纯隐式推理高22.7%。
- 推理链长度缩短58.4%,仅损失2.8%准确率,适合部署优化。
显式思维链(CoT)显著提升大语言模型的推理能力,但因自回归生成路径过长导致推理成本高昂。现有隐式推理方法常将推理过程统一压缩,致使关键中间步骤被过度压缩而降低准确性。本文提出选择性隐式思维(SLT)框架,可在同一推理轨迹中选择性压缩冗余部分为隐式表示,同时保留精度关键部分为显式CoT。SLT首先用轻量解码器预测短段未来推理,再通过置信度门控判断可可靠压缩的最长跨度。该跨度编码为紧凑隐式表示以提升效率,不确定或关键推理则保留在显式形式以保证准确率。为学习此选择策略,采用三阶段训练:逐跨度隐式压缩、可靠性感知未来推理预测及轨迹级强化学习,以平衡答案正确率与推理开销。在四个数学推理基准上实验表明,SLT在相近压缩比下比隐式推理基线准确率高出22.7%,推理链长度减少58.4%,相比显式CoT仅损失2.8%准确率。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning substantially improves the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), but incurs high inference cost due to lengthy autoregressive traces. Existing latent reasoning methods offer a promising alternative, yet they often treat reasoning as uniformly compressible, causing precision-critical intermediate steps to be overly compressed and thereby degrading reasoning accuracy. In this work, we propose Selective Latent Thinking (SLT), a framework that selectively compresses redundant reasoning spans into latent representations while preserving precision-critical spans as explicit CoT within the same reasoning trajectory. Specifically, SLT first uses a lightweight decoder to anticipate a short upcoming reasoning span, and then applies confidence-based gating to determine the longest span that can be reliably compressed. The accepted span is encoded into a compact latent representation to improve reasoning efficiency, while uncertain or precision-critical reasoning remains in explicit CoT form to preserve accuracy. To learn this selective compression policy, SLT adopts a three-stage training strategy that combines span-level latent compression, reliability-aware future reasoning prediction, and trajectory-level reinforcement learning to optimize the trade-off between answer correctness and reasoning cost. Extensive experiments across four mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that SLT achieves 22.7\% higher accuracy than latent reasoning baselines at comparable compression ratios, while reducing reasoning chain length by 58.4\% with only 2.8\% accuracy degradation compared to explicit CoT,Our code can be found in https://github.com/hunshi34/SLT.
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