arXiv:2608.26442cs.AIcs.CL2026-08

提出动态调整推理强度的机制,解决智能体系统中过度或不足推理的问题。

Don't Overthink, Don't Underthink: Toward Adaptive Reasoning in Agentic AI

  • 根据任务需求动态分配推理资源,避免固定策略带来的浪费或不足。
  • 在MATH-500和GAIA基准上发现过度推理增加开销但不提升准确率,不足推理则导致错误结果。
  • 适合研究智能体系统、复杂任务规划与高效推理机制的开发者与研究人员。

大型语言模型在推理能力上的提升已证明其对复杂任务有益。然而,现有方法多依赖固定的推理控制机制,如预设的令牌预算、执行前难度估计或激活空间干预,并常在独立推理基准上评估,难以适配真实智能体工作流。在智能体系统中,任务需求随规划、工具使用、记忆检索及代理间交互动态变化,导致推理可能过度或不足,引发不必要的计算、延迟增加、计划偏差、工具滥用或解决方案不完整。本文指出下一代智能体的核心挑战不是推理量多少,而是如何根据动态需求合理分配推理。通过分析过推理与欠推理两种失效模式,在MATH-500和GAIA公共验证基准上,发现过推理伴随更高计算成本却无精度提升,欠推理则始终导致错误或不完整解。该结果推动自适应推理机制的研究。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown that increased inference-time reasoning can improve performance on complex tasks. However, many existing approaches rely on fixed or preallocated reasoning controls, such as fixed token budgets, pre-execution difficulty estimates, or activation-space interventions, and are often evaluated on standalone reasoning benchmarks rather than full agentic workflows. These assumptions may not hold in agentic AI systems, where reasoning requirements evolve dynamically through planning, tool use, memory retrieval, and agent-to-agent interactions. Consequently, reasoning can become either excessive or insufficient, resulting in unnecessary computation, increased latency, planning drift, excessive tool use, or incomplete solutions. We argue that a major challenge for next-generation agentic AI is not merely how much reasoning a language model should perform, but how it should allocate reasoning according to evolving task demands. We characterize over-reasoning and under-reasoning as recurring failure modes of misallocated reasoning and evaluate them on MATH-500 and the GAIA public validation benchmark. Using tool-decision latency, token consumption, token-limit exhaustion, and answer correctness, our results suggest that cases classified as over-reasoning are associated with higher computational cost without proportional accuracy gains, whereas cases classified as under-reasoning are consistently associated with incorrect or incomplete solutions. These findings motivate future research on adaptive reasoning mechanisms for agentic AI.

智能体推理优化动态决策

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