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Dualformer: Controllable Fast and Slow Thinking by Learning with Randomized Reasoning Traces

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arxiv 2410.09918 v3 pith:MVRYENMO submitted 2024-10-13 cs.AI cs.LGcs.LO

Dualformer: Controllable Fast and Slow Thinking by Learning with Randomized Reasoning Traces

classification cs.AI cs.LGcs.LO
keywords reasoningdualformermodefastslowtracesoptimalrate
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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In cognition theory, human thinking is governed by two systems: the fast and intuitive System 1 and the slower but more deliberative System 2. Analogously, Large Language Models (LLMs) can operate in two reasoning modes: outputting only the solutions (\emph{fast mode}) or both the reasoning chain and the final solution (\emph{slow mode}). We present \dualformer, a single Transformer model that seamlessly integrates both the fast and slow reasoning modes by training on randomized reasoning traces, where different parts of the traces are strategically dropped during training. At inference time, \dualformer can be easily configured to execute in either fast or slow mode, or automatically decide which mode to engage (\emph{auto mode}). It outperforms baselines in both performance and computational efficiency across all three modes: (1) in slow mode, \dualformer achieves $97.6\%$ optimal rate on unseen $30 \times 30$ maze tasks, surpassing the \searchformer baseline ($93.3\%$) trained on data with complete reasoning traces, with $45.5\%$ fewer reasoning steps; (2) in fast mode, \dualformer achieves $80\%$ optimal rate, significantly outperforming the Solution-Only model trained on solution-only data, which has an optimal rate of only $30\%$; (3) in auto mode, \dualformer achieves $96.6\%$ optimal rate with $59.9\%$ fewer steps than \searchformer. Moreover, \dualformer produces more diverse reasoning traces than \searchformer{}. For math reasoning problems, our techniques have also achieved improved performance with LLM fine-tuning, demonstrating its generalization beyond task-specific models. We open source our code at https://github.com/facebookresearch/dualformer.

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Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space

    cs.CL 2024-12 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Coconut lets LLMs perform reasoning directly in continuous latent space by recycling hidden states as inputs, outperforming standard chain-of-thought on search-intensive logical tasks with better accuracy-efficiency t...

  2. HypEHR: Hyperbolic Modeling of Electronic Health Records for Efficient Question Answering

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    HypEHR is a hyperbolic embedding model for EHR data that uses Lorentzian geometry and hierarchy-aware pretraining to answer clinical questions nearly as well as large language models but with much smaller size.

  3. Vision-aligned Latent Reasoning for Multi-modal Large Language Model

    cs.CV 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    VaLR generates vision-aligned latent tokens before each reasoning step to preserve perceptual cues, improving VSI-Bench accuracy from 33.0% to 52.9%.

  4. Inference-Time Scaling for Diffusion Models beyond Scaling Denoising Steps

    cs.CV 2025-01 conditional novelty 6.0

    Diffusion models improve generation quality via inference-time search over noise candidates guided by verifiers and algorithms, yielding gains beyond denoising step scaling on class- and text-conditioned benchmarks.

  5. Search, Fail, Recover: A Training Framework for Correction-Aware Reasoning

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    Pyligent trains LLMs to search, detect failures via task validators, and backtrack to recoverable prefixes, improving solve rates by 13–73 points over gold-only SFT on hidden graphs, Sudoku, and Blocksworld.

  6. NoisyCoconut: Counterfactual Consensus via Latent Space Reasoning

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Injecting noise into LLM latent trajectories creates diverse reasoning paths whose agreement acts as a confidence signal for selective abstention, cutting error rates from 40-70% to under 15% on math tasks.

  7. Efficient Reasoning with Hidden Thinking

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    Heima compresses verbose CoT into hidden thinking tokens via information-theoretic analysis and an adaptive interpreter, claiming maintained or improved zero-shot accuracy on reasoning benchmarks.