CoT-Valve: Length-Compressible Chain-of-Thought Tuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ma, Xinyin, Wan, Guangnian, Yu, Runpeng, Fang, Gongfan, Wang, Xinchao
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Ma, Xinyin
Wan, Guangnian
Yu, Runpeng
Fang, Gongfan
Wang, Xinchao
author_facet Ma, Xinyin
Wan, Guangnian
Yu, Runpeng
Fang, Gongfan
Wang, Xinchao
contents Chain-of-Thought significantly enhances a model's reasoning capability, but it also comes with a considerable increase in inference costs due to long chains. With the observation that the reasoning path can be easily compressed under easy tasks but struggle on hard tasks, we explore the feasibility of elastically controlling the length of reasoning paths with only one model, thereby reducing the inference overhead of reasoning models dynamically based on task difficulty. We introduce a new tuning and inference strategy named CoT-Valve, designed to allow models to generate reasoning chains of varying lengths. To achieve this, we propose to identify a direction in the parameter space that, when manipulated, can effectively control the length of generated CoT. Moreover, we show that this property is valuable for compressing the reasoning chain. We construct datasets with chains from long to short for the same questions and explore two enhanced strategies for CoT-Valve: (1) a precise length-compressible CoT tuning method, and (2) a progressive chain length compression approach. Our experiments show that CoT-Valve successfully enables controllability and compressibility of the chain and shows better performance than the prompt-based control. We applied this method to QwQ-32B-Preview, reducing reasoning chains on GSM8K from 741 to 225 tokens with a minor performance drop (95.07% to 94.92%) and on AIME from 6827 to 4629 tokens, with only one additional incorrect answer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_09601
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CoT-Valve: Length-Compressible Chain-of-Thought Tuning
Ma, Xinyin
Wan, Guangnian
Yu, Runpeng
Fang, Gongfan
Wang, Xinchao
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Chain-of-Thought significantly enhances a model's reasoning capability, but it also comes with a considerable increase in inference costs due to long chains. With the observation that the reasoning path can be easily compressed under easy tasks but struggle on hard tasks, we explore the feasibility of elastically controlling the length of reasoning paths with only one model, thereby reducing the inference overhead of reasoning models dynamically based on task difficulty. We introduce a new tuning and inference strategy named CoT-Valve, designed to allow models to generate reasoning chains of varying lengths. To achieve this, we propose to identify a direction in the parameter space that, when manipulated, can effectively control the length of generated CoT. Moreover, we show that this property is valuable for compressing the reasoning chain. We construct datasets with chains from long to short for the same questions and explore two enhanced strategies for CoT-Valve: (1) a precise length-compressible CoT tuning method, and (2) a progressive chain length compression approach. Our experiments show that CoT-Valve successfully enables controllability and compressibility of the chain and shows better performance than the prompt-based control. We applied this method to QwQ-32B-Preview, reducing reasoning chains on GSM8K from 741 to 225 tokens with a minor performance drop (95.07% to 94.92%) and on AIME from 6827 to 4629 tokens, with only one additional incorrect answer.
title CoT-Valve: Length-Compressible Chain-of-Thought Tuning
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09601