让大模型动态决定何时停止推理,更省计算还更准。
AERA: Adaptive Evidence Residual Allocation for Efficient Test-Time Reasoning

- 用多维度证据判断是否继续推理,而非仅看当前信心
- 在GSM8K上用96%的token达到92.61%准确率,省96%算力
- 适合追求高效推理的模型部署与实际应用者
测试时扩展通过生成额外候选解提升语言模型推理能力,但对所有问题分配相同推理预算会造成计算浪费。现有自适应停止方法通常依赖置信度、一致性和答案稳定性,隐含假设是当前证据越强,越无需进一步计算。我们发现这一假设可能失效:检查点级正确性非单调变化,可观测证据可能在答案崩溃前增强,或在恢复前减弱。为此,我们提出自适应证据残余分配(AERA),一种顺序控制器,学习从检查点可观测证据中判断进一步计算是否可能获得更好答案。AERA利用答案分布、时间、重解、语义和计算特征表征累积响应前缀,并反复决策是否停止或分配下一个响应块。未来检查点正确性仅用于离线监督,推理时不使用。在GSM8K和GPQA Diamond上,AERA识别出问题特异性残余机会,显著减少推理计算。在300个未见GSM8K问题的冻结阈值增量生成评估中,AERA以128次响应的93.01%准确率,仅用95.99%的完成标记数达成92.61%准确率。结果表明,自适应推理应估计计算的未来价值,而非将当前置信度等同于正确性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Test-time scaling improves language-model reasoning by generating additional candidate solutions, but allocating the same inference budget to every problem is computationally wasteful. Existing adaptive stopping methods commonly rely on confidence, agreement, or answer stability, implicitly assuming that stronger current evidence indicates that further computation is unnecessary. We show that this assumption can fail: checkpoint-level correctness evolves non-monotonically, and observable evidence may strengthen before an answer collapses or weaken before it recovers. Motivated by this mismatch, we introduce Adaptive Evidence Residual Allocation (AERA), a sequential controller that learns whether additional computation is likely to recover a better answer from checkpoint-observable evidence. AERA characterizes cumulative response prefixes using answer-distribution, temporal, re-solving, semantic, and compute features, and repeatedly decides whether to stop or allocate the next response block. Future checkpoint correctness is used only to construct offline supervision and is never available to the controller at inference time. Across GSM8K and GPQA Diamond, AERA identifies question-specific residual opportunities while substantially reducing inference computation. In a frozen-threshold incremental-generation evaluation on 300 untouched GSM8K questions, AERA achieves 92.61% accuracy versus 93.01% with 128 responses while reducing completion tokens by 95.99%. These results suggest that adaptive reasoning should estimate the future value of computation rather than equating present confidence with correctness.
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