RelayGen: Intra-Generation Model Switching for Efficient Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Song, Jiwon, Kim, Yoongon, Kim, Jae-Joon
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866912884164919296
author Song, Jiwon
Kim, Yoongon
Kim, Jae-Joon
author_facet Song, Jiwon
Kim, Yoongon
Kim, Jae-Joon
contents Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks by generating long, multi-step reasoning trajectories, but inference-time scaling incurs substantial deployment cost. A key challenge is that generation difficulty varies within a single output, whereas existing efficiency-oriented approaches either ignore this intra-generation variation or rely on supervised token-level routing with high system complexity. We present \textbf{RelayGen}, a training-free, segment-level runtime model switching framework that exploits difficulty variation in long-form reasoning. Through offline analysis of generation uncertainty using token probability margins, we show that coarse-grained segment-level control is sufficient to capture difficulty transitions within a reasoning trajectory. RelayGen identifies model-specific switch cues that signal transitions to lower-difficulty segments and dynamically delegates their continuation to a smaller model, while preserving high-difficulty reasoning on the large model. Across multiple reasoning benchmarks, RelayGen substantially reduces inference latency while preserving most of the accuracy of large models. When combined with speculative decoding, RelayGen achieves up to 2.2$\times$ end-to-end speedup with less than 2\% accuracy degradation, without requiring additional training or learned routing components.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_06454
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RelayGen: Intra-Generation Model Switching for Efficient Reasoning
Song, Jiwon
Kim, Yoongon
Kim, Jae-Joon
Computation and Language
Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks by generating long, multi-step reasoning trajectories, but inference-time scaling incurs substantial deployment cost. A key challenge is that generation difficulty varies within a single output, whereas existing efficiency-oriented approaches either ignore this intra-generation variation or rely on supervised token-level routing with high system complexity. We present \textbf{RelayGen}, a training-free, segment-level runtime model switching framework that exploits difficulty variation in long-form reasoning. Through offline analysis of generation uncertainty using token probability margins, we show that coarse-grained segment-level control is sufficient to capture difficulty transitions within a reasoning trajectory. RelayGen identifies model-specific switch cues that signal transitions to lower-difficulty segments and dynamically delegates their continuation to a smaller model, while preserving high-difficulty reasoning on the large model. Across multiple reasoning benchmarks, RelayGen substantially reduces inference latency while preserving most of the accuracy of large models. When combined with speculative decoding, RelayGen achieves up to 2.2$\times$ end-to-end speedup with less than 2\% accuracy degradation, without requiring additional training or learned routing components.
title RelayGen: Intra-Generation Model Switching for Efficient Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06454