Large language models improve final-answer accuracy through extended chain-of-thought reasoning, but often spend tokens inefficiently and offer little inference-time control. Existing efficient reasoning methods control thinking length by shortening, early-stopping, or compressing traces, leaving how the model thinks implicit. In this paper, we propose Agentic Chain-of-Thought Steering (ACTS), which formulates reasoning steering as a Markov decision process where a controller agent adaptively steers a frozen reasoner during inference. At each step, the controller observes the reasoning trace and remaining thinking budget, then issues a steering action consisting of a reasoning strategy and a steering phrase that initiates the next reasoner step. This enables budget-aware strategy control for efficient reasoning while preserving the reasoner's generation continuity. We initialize the controller agent from our constructed synthetic steering trajectories with multi-budget augmentation, and further optimize it via reinforcement learning with budget-conditioned reward shaping. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that ACTS matches full-thinking performance with substantial token savings, and enables controllable accuracy-efficiency trade-offs across different reasoners and tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/Andree-9/ACTS.
ACTS:面向高效可控LLM推理的智能体链式思维引导
AI 导读
ACTS将推理引导建模为马尔可夫决策过程,控制器智能体在推理中自适应引导冻结的推理器。控制器每步观察推理轨迹与剩余预算,发出含推理策略和引导短语的动作,实现预算感知的推理控制。控制器通过合成轨迹初始化,并经强化学习优化。在多个基准上,ACTS以显著token节省匹配全思考性能,实现可控的精度-效率权衡。代码已开源。
HuggingFace Daily Papers(社区热门论文)
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AI 编辑部评分,满分 100ACTS:面向高效可控LLM推理的智能体链式思维引导
ACTS将推理引导建模为马尔可夫决策过程,控制器智能体在推理中自适应引导冻结的推理器。控制器每步观察推理轨迹与剩余预算,发出含推理策略和引导短语的动作,实现预算感知的推理控制。控制器通过合成轨迹初始化,并经强化学习优化。在多个基准上,ACTS以显著token节省匹配全思考性能,实现可控的精度-效率权衡。代码已开源。
推荐理由
ACTS 把 LLM 推理过程变成可控制的 MDP,用预算感知的策略节省 token 同时保持精度,做推理加速的研究者应该试试他们开源的代码。
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来源:HuggingFace Daily Papers(社区热门论文)· arxiv.org