@inproceedings{wang-etal-2024-reasoning-token,
    title = "Reasoning in Token Economies: Budget-Aware Evaluation of {LLM} Reasoning Strategies",
    author = "Wang, Junlin  and
      Jain, Siddhartha  and
      Zhang, Dejiao  and
      Ray, Baishakhi  and
      Kumar, Varun  and
      Athiwaratkun, Ben",
    editor = "Al-Onaizan, Yaser  and
      Bansal, Mohit  and
      Chen, Yun-Nung",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/Add-Cong-Liu-Florida-Atlantic-University-author-id/2024.emnlp-main.1112/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.1112",
    pages = "19916--19939",
    abstract = "A diverse array of reasoning strategies has been proposed to elicit the capabilities of large language models. However, in this paper, we point out that traditional evaluations which focus solely on performance metrics miss a key factor: the increased effectiveness due to additional compute. By overlooking this aspect, a skewed view of strategy efficiency is often presented. This paper introduces a framework that incorporates the compute budget into the evaluation, providing a more informative comparison that takes into account both performance metrics and computational cost. In this budget-aware perspective, we find that complex reasoning strategies often don`t surpass simpler baselines purely due to algorithmic ingenuity, but rather due to the larger computational resources allocated. When we provide a simple baseline like chain-of-thought self-consistency with comparable compute resources, it frequently outperforms reasoning strategies proposed in the literature. In this scale-aware perspective, we find that unlike self-consistency, certain strategies such as multi-agent debate or Reflexion can become worse if more compute budget is utilized."
}