通过不确定性与推理进度的对齐,识别模型推理状态并智能干预。
UPAIR: Diagnosing Reasoning States via Uncertainty-Progress Alignment for Selective Intervention

- 用不确定性和推理进展的时序关系判断推理状态
- 在5个基准上检测64.3%自然错误,误报仅5.4%
- 无需训练,可自动切换策略或停止推理,提升效率
尽管测试时扩展通过额外推理计算提升了大推理模型(LRMs)的问题求解能力,但也加剧了过度思考和思考不足的问题,我们将其定义为推理状态-动作不匹配。解决这一问题需要可靠的推理状态诊断,但单一信号监测提供模糊证据,而基于引导的控制器常依赖结果标注监督或模型特定校准。我们提出不确定性-进展对齐假说,认为代理答案不确定性与潜在推理进展的相对转移时机可区分健康、停滞和准备就绪状态,对应不同后续操作。基于此,我们提出UPAIR,一种无需训练的框架,将轻量级不确定性监控与事件触发的联合诊断结合,并将状态映射至原生继续、选择性策略切换或验证引导的停止。在三个大推理模型和五个跨领域基准上,停滞状态诊断检测到64.3%的自然错误,仅误标5.4%正确样本,揭示了跨模型和任务的动态推理规律。端到端下,UPAIR准确率最高提升16.67个百分点,生成词元减少29.64%,证明其诊断与干预集成的有效性,且在线诊断耗时低于自然生成时间的1%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
While test-time scaling improves the problem-solving ability of large reasoning models (LRMs) through additional inference-time computation, it can also exacerbate overthinking and underthinking, which we formulate as reasoning state--action mismatch. Resolving this mismatch requires reliable reasoning state diagnosis, yet single-signal monitors provide ambiguous evidence, while steering-based controllers often rely on outcome-labeled supervision or model-specific calibration. We introduce the Uncertainty--Progress Alignment Hypothesis, which posits that the relative transition timing of proxy answer uncertainty and latent reasoning progress distinguishes healthy, stagnant, and ready states that warrant different subsequent actions. Building on this insight, we propose UPAIR, a training-free framework that couples lightweight uncertainty monitoring with event-triggered joint diagnosis and maps the resulting state to native continuation, selective strategy switching, or verification-guided stopping. Across three LRMs and five cross-domain benchmarks, the stagnation diagnosis detects 64.3% of natural errors while flagging only 5.4% of correct samples, revealing a dynamic reasoning regularity shared across models and tasks. End to end, UPAIR improves accuracy by up to 16.67 percentage points and reduces generated tokens by up to 29.64%, demonstrating the effectiveness of its integrated diagnosis and intervention, while online diagnosis costs less than 1% of natural-generation time.
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