Expediting and Elevating Large Language Model Reasoning via Hidden Chain-of-Thought Decoding

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Hauptverfasser: Liu, Tianqiao, Chen, Zui, Liu, Zitao, Tian, Mi, Luo, Weiqi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Liu, Tianqiao
Chen, Zui
Liu, Zitao
Tian, Mi
Luo, Weiqi
author_facet Liu, Tianqiao
Chen, Zui
Liu, Zitao
Tian, Mi
Luo, Weiqi
contents Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tasks requiring reasoning and multi-step problem-solving through the use of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. However, generating the full CoT process results in significantly longer output sequences, leading to increased computational costs and latency during inference. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach to compress the CoT process through semantic alignment, enabling more efficient decoding while preserving the benefits of CoT reasoning. Our method introduces an auxiliary CoT model that learns to generate and compress the full thought process into a compact special token representation semantically aligned with the original CoT output. This compressed representation is then integrated into the input of the Hidden Chain-of-Thought (HCoT) model. The training process follows a two-stage procedure: First, the CoT model is optimized to generate the compressed token representations aligned with the ground-truth CoT outputs using a contrastive loss. Subsequently, with the CoT model parameters frozen, the HCoT model is fine-tuned to generate accurate subsequent predictions conditioned on the prefix instruction and the compressed CoT representations from the CoT model. Extensive experiments across three challenging domains - mathematical reasoning, agent invocation, and question answering - demonstrate that our semantic compression approach achieves competitive or improved performance compared to the full CoT baseline, while providing significant speedups of at least 1.5x in decoding time. Moreover, incorporating contrastive learning objectives further enhances the quality of the compressed representations, leading to better CoT prompting and improved task accuracy. Our work paves the way for more efficient exploitation of multi-step reasoning capabilities in LLMs across a wide range of applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_08561
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Expediting and Elevating Large Language Model Reasoning via Hidden Chain-of-Thought Decoding
Liu, Tianqiao
Chen, Zui
Liu, Zitao
Tian, Mi
Luo, Weiqi
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tasks requiring reasoning and multi-step problem-solving through the use of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. However, generating the full CoT process results in significantly longer output sequences, leading to increased computational costs and latency during inference. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach to compress the CoT process through semantic alignment, enabling more efficient decoding while preserving the benefits of CoT reasoning. Our method introduces an auxiliary CoT model that learns to generate and compress the full thought process into a compact special token representation semantically aligned with the original CoT output. This compressed representation is then integrated into the input of the Hidden Chain-of-Thought (HCoT) model. The training process follows a two-stage procedure: First, the CoT model is optimized to generate the compressed token representations aligned with the ground-truth CoT outputs using a contrastive loss. Subsequently, with the CoT model parameters frozen, the HCoT model is fine-tuned to generate accurate subsequent predictions conditioned on the prefix instruction and the compressed CoT representations from the CoT model. Extensive experiments across three challenging domains - mathematical reasoning, agent invocation, and question answering - demonstrate that our semantic compression approach achieves competitive or improved performance compared to the full CoT baseline, while providing significant speedups of at least 1.5x in decoding time. Moreover, incorporating contrastive learning objectives further enhances the quality of the compressed representations, leading to better CoT prompting and improved task accuracy. Our work paves the way for more efficient exploitation of multi-step reasoning capabilities in LLMs across a wide range of applications.
title Expediting and Elevating Large Language Model Reasoning via Hidden Chain-of-Thought Decoding
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08561