Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved exceptional performance in complex reasoning via Chain-of-Thought (CoT), yet the associated computational costs remain prohibitive. CoT reasoning contains significant untapped efficiency potential across two dimensions: temporal redundancy, where reasoning steps may be unnecessary, and spatial redundancy, where computations can be performed at reduced precision. While current optimization techniques often necessitate resource-intensive fine-tuning or data curation, we introduce ASTRO (Adaptive Spatial and Temporal Redundancy Optimization), a training-free framework that simultaneously addresses both dimensions. ASTRO leverages Dewey’s reflective thinking model to segment reasoning phases, applying a progressive precision reduction strategy coupled with an entropy-based confidence mechanism for adaptive termination. Empirical results across diverse reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that ASTRO achieves up to an 11.3 × efficiency gain without compromising accuracy, highlighting the advantages of holistic multi-dimensional redundancy management over isolated optimization methods.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for automated data annotation, yet reliance on expensive commercial models like GPT-4 limits accessibility. This paper rigorously evaluates the potential of open-source smaller LLMs (sLLMs) as a cost-effective alternative. We introduce a new benchmark dataset, Multidisciplinary Open Research Data (MORD), comprising 12,277 annotated sentence segments from 1,500 schoolarly articles across five research domains, to systematically assess sLLM performance. Our experiments demonstrate that sLLMs achieve annotation quality surpassing Amazon MTurk workers and approach GPT-4’s accuracy at significantly lower costs. We further propose to build the Crowd of LLMs, which aggregates annotations from multiple sLLMs using label aggregation algorithms. This approach not only outperforms individual sLLMs but also reveals that combining sLLM annotations with human crowd labels yields superior results compared to either method alone. Our findings highlight the viability of sLLMs for democratizing high-quality data annotation while underscoring the need for tailored aggregation methods to fully realize their potential.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. However, deploying LLMs on resource-limited settings remains a challenge. While early-exit techniques offer an effective approach, they often require compromised training methods that result in sub-optimal performance. On the other hand, multi-model methods achieve improved results but suffer from significant inference latency and memory consumption. In this paper, we propose LoRAExit, a novel dynamic inference architecture that leverages low-rank adaptors for efficient deployment of LLMs. LoRAExit decouples the training of multiple exit interfaces, enabling the separate optimization of each exit, thereby fundamentally addressing the performance issues of early-exit networks. Moreover, we introduce a superior-exit guided distillation method that effectively utilizes models of different sizes, thereby further enhancing the performance of early exits. Experimental results demonstrate that LoRAExit significantly improves LLM performance when deployed on resource-limited settings.