Baoduo Xu

Zongqian Wu, Tianyu Li, Baoduo Xu et al.

Deep iterative chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables LLMs to tackle complex tasks by progressively activating relevant pre-trained knowledge. However, it faces challenges in ensuring continual improvement and determining a stopping criterion. In this paper, we investigate whether the relevant knowledge that contributes directly to solving the given question can be activated from the initial reasoning path, thus circumventing the need for iterative refinement. Our experiments reveal that increasing the diversity of initial reasoning paths can achieve comparable or superior performance, a concept we term \textit{breadth reasoning}. However, existing breadth reasoning approaches, such as self-consistency, offer limited diversity. To address this limitation, we propose a simple yet effective method that enhances reasoning breadth by integrating contextual exploration with reduced sampling randomness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms deep iterative reasoning. Our code is provided in https://github.com/zongqianwu/breadth.

Zongqian Wu, Baoduo Xu, Ruochen Cui et al.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as an effective approach for activating latent capabilities in LLMs. Interestingly, we observe that both CoT reasoning and self-training share the core objective: iteratively leveraging model-generated information to progressively reduce prediction uncertainty. Building on this insight, we propose a novel CoT framework to improve reasoning performance. Our framework integrates two key components: (i) a task-specific prompt module that optimizes the initial reasoning process, and (ii) an adaptive reasoning iteration module that dynamically refines the reasoning process and addresses the limitations of previous CoT approaches, \ie over-reasoning and high similarity between consecutive reasoning iterations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant advantages in both performance and computational efficiency.

Zongqian Wu, Baoduo Xu, Tianyu Li et al.

Test-time scaling (TTS) has been shown to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) by sampling and aggregating diverse reasoning paths. However, existing research has overlooked a critical issue: selection bias of reasoning strategies during scaling. Specifically, when generating reasoning processes, LLMs tend to follow certain strategies (e.g., algebraic solutions for math problems) while neglecting other valid alternatives (e.g., geometric solutions), resulting in insufficient exploration of the solution space. To further understand the impact of this bias, we present a theoretical analysis that reveals when it undermines the effectiveness of test-time scaling. Motivated by this theoretical insight, we introduce TTS-Uniform, a framework designed to mitigate the selection bias of reasoning strategies. It (i) identifies potential strategies, (ii) uniformly allocates the sampling budget across them, and (iii) filters out unstable strategies prior to aggregation. Experimental results show that TTS-Uniform significantly enhances scaling effectiveness across multiple mainstream LLMs and benchmark datasets.