arXiv Machine Learning By Niklas Muennighoff, Zhengyang Wang, Zeyi Chen, Weijia Shi, Binyuan Hui, John Yang, Dapeng Jiang, Mika Senghaas, Fares Obeid, Johannes Hagemann, Sami Jaghouar, Ludwig Schmidt, Percy Liang, Jason Wei, Andrew Y. Ng, Luke Zettlemoyer, Yejin Choi, Mike Lewis

Prefix Sliding for efficient test-time scaling

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper introduces Prefix Sliding, a method that discards intermediate reasoning tokens during test-time scaling of language models, keeping only the prefix with key instructions and the most recent few thousand tokens. This approach limits memory usage regardless of reasoning length, enabling efficient long-horizon scaling. Experiments show that without training, Prefix Sliding can triple inference speed while preserving performance, and with reinforcement learning it can further improve results on very long reasoning traces.

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