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Stepwise Perplexity-Guided Refinement for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models

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arxiv 2502.13260 v1 pith:QM2566HV submitted 2025-02-18 cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG

Stepwise Perplexity-Guided Refinement for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models

classification cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG
keywords reasoningstepscriticalmethodmodelschain-of-thoughtexampleslanguage
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, which breaks down complex tasks into intermediate reasoning steps, has significantly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) on challenging tasks. However, the detailed reasoning process in CoT often incurs long generation times and high computational costs, partly due to the inclusion of unnecessary steps. To address this, we propose a method to identify critical reasoning steps using perplexity as a measure of their importance: a step is deemed critical if its removal causes a significant increase in perplexity. Our method enables models to focus solely on generating these critical steps. This can be achieved through two approaches: refining demonstration examples in few-shot CoT or fine-tuning the model using selected examples that include only critical steps. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, which achieves a better balance between the reasoning accuracy and efficiency of CoT.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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

  1. Post Reasoning: Improving the Performance of Non-Thinking Models at No Cost

    cs.AI 2026-05 conditional novelty 7.0

    Post-Reasoning boosts LLM accuracy by reversing the usual answer-after-reasoning order, delivering mean relative gains of 17.37% across 117 model-benchmark pairs with zero extra cost.

  2. Detecting Unfaithful Chain-of-Thought via Circuit-Guided Internal-External Discrepancy

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    CIE-Scorer detects unfaithful CoT by tracing compact sentence-level circuits, building internal-external reasoning graphs, and scoring their discrepancy with Fused Gromov-Wasserstein distance, reporting SOTA results o...

  3. GlimpRouter: Efficient Collaborative Inference by Glimpsing One Token of Thoughts

    cs.AI 2026-01 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    GlimpRouter uses the entropy of the first token in each reasoning step to decide whether to invoke a large model, yielding 10.7% higher accuracy and 25.9% lower latency than a standalone large model on AIME25.

  4. Thinking Economically: A Hierarchical Framework for Adaptive-Complexity Reasoning in LLMs

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    HAB applies coarse-to-fine budgeting to LLM reasoning, predicting per-problem depth and learning intra-step token budgets via PPL comparisons and adaptive Pareto optimization, yielding higher accuracy and lower token ...

  5. Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-03 accept novelty 5.0

    A survey organizing techniques to achieve efficient reasoning in LLMs by shortening chain-of-thought outputs.

  6. Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models

    cs.AI 2025-03 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    The paper unifies perspectives on Long CoT in reasoning LLMs by introducing a taxonomy, detailing characteristics of deep reasoning and reflection, and discussing emergence phenomena and future directions.