DAST: Difficulty-Adaptive Slow-Thinking for Large Reasoning Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04472v1
• Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2025 14:23:06 GMT
• Title: DAST: Difficulty-Adaptive Slow-Thinking for Large Reasoning Models
• Authors: Yi Shen, Jian Zhang, Jieyun Huang, Shuming Shi, Wenjing Zhang, Jiangze Yan, Ning Wang, Kai Wang, Shiguo Lian,
• Abstract summary: This paper introduces Difficulty-Adaptive Slow-Thinking (DAST), a novel framework that enables models to autonomously adjust the length of Chain-of-Thought(CoT) based on problem difficulty.<n>Experiments on diverse datasets and model scales demonstrate that DAST effectively mitigates overthinking while preserving reasoning accuracy on complex problems.
• Score: 31.189242663680695
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Recent advancements in slow-thinking reasoning models have shown exceptional performance in complex reasoning tasks. However, these models often exhibit overthinking-generating redundant reasoning steps for simple problems, leading to excessive computational resource usage. While current mitigation strategies uniformly reduce reasoning tokens, they risk degrading performance on challenging tasks that require extended reasoning. This paper introduces Difficulty-Adaptive Slow-Thinking (DAST), a novel framework that enables models to autonomously adjust the length of Chain-of-Thought(CoT) based on problem difficulty. We first propose a Token Length Budget (TLB) metric to quantify difficulty, then leveraging length-aware reward shaping and length preference optimization to implement DAST. DAST penalizes overlong responses for simple tasks while incentivizing sufficient reasoning for complex problems. Experiments on diverse datasets and model scales demonstrate that DAST effectively mitigates overthinking (reducing token usage by over 30\% on average) while preserving reasoning accuracy on complex problems.

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