Self-Consistency (SC) is a decoding strategy that samples diverse reasoning paths and selects the most consistent answer, demonstrating strong performance on complex reasoning problems. However, the excessive token consumption incurred by generating multiple reasoning paths has been identified as a major limitation of SC. To improve computational efficiency, several studies have proposed strategies that adjust the number of reasoning paths or allocate resources differentially according to problem difficulty. Nevertheless, most existing methods categorize difficulty into a few fixed levels, failing to fully capture the continuously varying nature of reasoning complexity. In this work, we propose Flexible Self-Consistency (FSC), which estimates problem difficulty as a continuous signal and dynamically adjusts the number of generated reasoning paths accordingly. FSC predicts the output entropy of an input question using a pre-trained probe and leverages it as an indicator of model uncertainty to flexibly control the sampling budget. Experimental results show that, across various models and benchmarks, FSC maintains accuracy comparable to SC while achieving token savings of up to 76%.
Sihyeong Yeom, Geon Park, Geunyeong Jeong et al.· 0 citations
Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends static RAG by allowing language models to iteratively reason, generate search queries, retrieve evidence, and predict answers. However, it remains challenging for models to decide when to retrieve, whether to use lexical matching or semantic similarity, and how to control context granularity to prevent irrelevant tokens from interfering with agent reasoning. In this paper, we introduce GRASP, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for training agents to adaptively coordinate complementary retrieval tools during multi-step reasoning. GRASP provides the agent with semantic search, keyword search, and paragraph-reading actions, enabling it to retrieve sentence-level evidence and expand further context only when needed. We train the policy with a reward that jointly accounts for answer accuracy, grounded reading, complementary search, and turn efficiency. Experiments on multi-hop reasoning benchmarks show that GRASP improves both retrieval recall and downstream question answering performance compared with single-step retrieval, prompting-based agentic RAG, and RL-based retrieval baselines. Qualitative and ablation analyses show that the learned policy develops interpretable skimming and scanning behavior: it uses semantic search for broad exploration, paragraph reading for local verification, and keyword search for entity-specific evidence. These results suggest that learning to coordinate retrieval signals and context granularity is critical for agent's correct reasoning.
Varun Gandhi, Jaewook Lee, Shantanu Todmal et al.· 0 citations