让大模型像精打细算一样思考,自动调节推理复杂度。
Thinking Economically: A Hierarchical Framework for Adaptive-Complexity Reasoning in LLMs

- 分层预算机制:根据问题和步骤动态分配计算资源。
- 在GSM8K和MATH500上比标准CoT更准且少用30%以上token。
- 适合追求高效高精度推理的AI研发与部署场景。
链式思维(CoT)显著提升了大模型的推理能力,但常因“过度思考”导致计算开销过大——生成过长的推理过程却未带来相应准确率提升。现有效率方法多采用统一压缩策略,忽视了推理复杂度在问题间和步骤内的异质性。为此,我们提出“经济化思考”原则:依据任务与步骤的内在需求智能分配计算资源,而非追求统一简洁。我们设计了分层自适应预算器(HAB),通过粗到细的预算机制实现该原则。在跨步骤层面,预测每道题的最佳推理深度;在步骤内层面,基于概率困惑度(PPL)的步骤对比学习和自适应帕累托优化目标,捕捉局部质量-效率权衡,并引入费雪信息量剪枝器提供训练期细粒度指导,促使生成器内化更经济的推理模式。在GSM8K和MATH500上的实验表明,HAB不仅优于标准CoT的准确率,还大幅减少token使用量,在性能-效率权衡上超越所有基线方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has significantly enhanced LLM reasoning, yet often incurs substantial computational overhead due to "overthinking": generating excessively long rationales without commensurate accuracy gains. Existing efficiency methods typically apply uniform compression, which overlooks a critical observation that reasoning complexity is heterogeneous at two distinct granularity: across different problems and within individual reasoning steps. This motivates our principle of Thinking Economically: intelligently allocating computational resources based on intrinsic task and step demands rather than pursuing uniform brevity. We propose Hierarchical Adaptive Budgeter (HAB), a training framework that operationalizes this principle through coarse-to-fine budgeting. At the inter-step level, HAB predicts the optimal reasoning depth for each problem. At the intra-step level, HAB learns step-specific token budgeting signals from PPL-derived step comparisons and an adaptive Pareto optimization objective that captures the local quality-efficiency trade-off, while a Fisher Information-based pruner further provides fine-grained training-time guidance, thereby encouraging the generator to internalize more economical reasoning patterns. Experiments on GSM8K and MATH500 show that HAB not only surpasses standard CoT in accuracy but also reduces token usage, achieving a stronger performance-efficiency trade-off than the compared baselines.
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