Think Smarter not Harder: Adaptive Reasoning with Inference Aware Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yu, Zishun, Xu, Tengyu, Jin, Di, Sankararaman, Karthik Abinav, He, Yun, Zhou, Wenxuan, Zeng, Zhouhao, Helenowski, Eryk, Zhu, Chen, Wang, Sinong, Ma, Hao, Fang, Han
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yu, Zishun
Xu, Tengyu
Jin, Di
Sankararaman, Karthik Abinav
He, Yun
Zhou, Wenxuan
Zeng, Zhouhao
Helenowski, Eryk
Zhu, Chen
Wang, Sinong
Ma, Hao
Fang, Han
author_facet Yu, Zishun
Xu, Tengyu
Jin, Di
Sankararaman, Karthik Abinav
He, Yun
Zhou, Wenxuan
Zeng, Zhouhao
Helenowski, Eryk
Zhu, Chen
Wang, Sinong
Ma, Hao
Fang, Han
contents Solving mathematics problems has been an intriguing capability of large language models, and many efforts have been made to improve reasoning by extending reasoning length, such as through self-correction and extensive long chain-of-thoughts. While promising in problem-solving, advanced long reasoning chain models exhibit an undesired single-modal behavior, where trivial questions require unnecessarily tedious long chains of thought. In this work, we propose a way to allow models to be aware of inference budgets by formulating it as utility maximization with respect to an inference budget constraint, hence naming our algorithm Inference Budget-Constrained Policy Optimization (IBPO). In a nutshell, models fine-tuned through IBPO learn to ``understand'' the difficulty of queries and allocate inference budgets to harder ones. With different inference budgets, our best models are able to have a $4.14$\% and $5.74$\% absolute improvement ($8.08$\% and $11.2$\% relative improvement) on MATH500 using $2.16$x and $4.32$x inference budgets respectively, relative to LLaMA3.1 8B Instruct. These improvements are approximately $2$x those of self-consistency under the same budgets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_17974
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Think Smarter not Harder: Adaptive Reasoning with Inference Aware Optimization
Yu, Zishun
Xu, Tengyu
Jin, Di
Sankararaman, Karthik Abinav
He, Yun
Zhou, Wenxuan
Zeng, Zhouhao
Helenowski, Eryk
Zhu, Chen
Wang, Sinong
Ma, Hao
Fang, Han
Artificial Intelligence
Solving mathematics problems has been an intriguing capability of large language models, and many efforts have been made to improve reasoning by extending reasoning length, such as through self-correction and extensive long chain-of-thoughts. While promising in problem-solving, advanced long reasoning chain models exhibit an undesired single-modal behavior, where trivial questions require unnecessarily tedious long chains of thought. In this work, we propose a way to allow models to be aware of inference budgets by formulating it as utility maximization with respect to an inference budget constraint, hence naming our algorithm Inference Budget-Constrained Policy Optimization (IBPO). In a nutshell, models fine-tuned through IBPO learn to ``understand'' the difficulty of queries and allocate inference budgets to harder ones. With different inference budgets, our best models are able to have a $4.14$\% and $5.74$\% absolute improvement ($8.08$\% and $11.2$\% relative improvement) on MATH500 using $2.16$x and $4.32$x inference budgets respectively, relative to LLaMA3.1 8B Instruct. These improvements are approximately $2$x those of self-consistency under the same budgets.
title Think Smarter not Harder: Adaptive Reasoning with Inference Aware Optimization
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17974