Title: SynAdapt: Learning Adaptive Reasoning in Large Language Models via Synthetic Continuous Chain-of-Thought
Primary area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
Keywords: Large Language Models, Large Reasoning Models, Efficient Reasoning, Implicit Reasoning

Abstract: While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves model performance, it incurs significant time costs due to the generation of discrete CoT tokens (DCoT). Continuous CoT (CCoT) offers a more efficient alternative, but existing CCoT methods are hampered by indirect fine-tuning, limited alignment, or inconsistent targets. To overcome these limitations, we propose ***SynAdapt***, an innovative efficient reasoning framework. Specifically, *SynAdapt* generates the synthetic CCoT to serve as a precise and effective alignment target for LLMs. This synthetic CCoT explicitly guides the LLM to learn CCoT and derive accurate answers directly. Furthermore, relying solely on CCoT is insufficient for solving hard questions. To address this, *SynAdapt* integrates a difficulty classifier that leverages both question context and CCoT to identify hard questions. CCoT can effectively help identify hard questions after some brief reasoning. We then adaptively prompt the LLM to re-think these hard questions for improved performance. Extensive experimental results across various benchmarks from different difficulty levels strongly demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving the best accuracy-efficiency trade-off.

TL;DR: We propose an novel efficient reasoning framework for LLM by using synthetic continuous Chain-of-Thought to provide better alignment target.