Learning to Ponder: Adaptive Reasoning in Latent Space
This addresses the challenge of optimizing test-time compute for LLMs, offering a more efficient solution for complex reasoning tasks, though it is incremental as it builds on existing paradigms like adaptive compute.
The paper tackles the problem of inefficient uniform compute allocation in LLM reasoning by introducing FR-Ponder, a framework that adaptively allocates reasoning depth per input using latent steering, achieving improved accuracy with lower FLOPs on benchmarks like GSM8K and MATH500.
Test-time compute has emerged as a key paradigm for enhancing LLM reasoning, yet prevailing approaches like Best-of-N and majority voting apply uniform depth across inputs, wasting computation on simple queries while potentially under-thinking complex ones. We present FR-Ponder, a single-graph, backbone-training-free framework that allocates instance-adaptive reasoning compute via latent steering. A less than 1M-param controller observes hidden states and decides to halt or apply a small ponder step by adding a pre-computed steering vector to frozen representations. Our method extracts the latent steering vector associated with deeper reasoning outputs and direct IO from LLM and re-applies it through a tunable scaling factor, allowing the model to adapt its reasoning depth to the complexity of each input. To balance performance and computational cost, we employ Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) as a reward signal to adaptively regulate reasoning depth, achieving task accuracy while mitigating overreasoning. Through curriculum learning and careful reward engineering, FR-Ponder learns calibrated compute allocation correlated with problem difficulty. On GSM8K and MATH500, FR-Ponder improves the compute-accuracy frontier, delivering lower FLOPs with better matched accuracy and comparing favorably to early-exit baselines, without modifying backbone weights. Analyses visualize interpretable steering directions and show learned compute allocation correlates with problem difficulty.