Token-Budget-Aware LLM Reasoning
Authors: name: Tingxu Han; name: Chunrong Fang; name: Shiyu Zhao; name: Shiqing Ma; name: Zhenyu Chen; name: Zhenting Wang
Published: 2024-12-24 16:55:45

Abstract: Reasoning is critical for large language models (LLMs) to excel in a wide
range of tasks. While methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhance LLM
performance by decomposing problems into intermediate steps, they also incur
significant overhead in token usage, leading to increased costs. We find that
the reasoning process of current LLMs is unnecessarily lengthy and it can be
compressed by including a reasonable token budget in the prompt, but the choice
of token budget plays a crucial role in the actual compression effectiveness.
We then propose a token-budget-aware LLM reasoning framework, which dynamically
estimates token budgets for different problems based on reasoning complexity
and uses the estimated token budgets to guide the reasoning process.
Experiments show that our method effectively reduces token costs in CoT
reasoning with only a slight performance reduction, offering a practical
solution to balance efficiency and accuracy in LLM reasoning. Code:
https://github.com/GeniusHTX/TALE.