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Learning Adaptive Parallel Reasoning with Language Models (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on May 11, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A language model learns to split its thinking into parallel sub-threads it starts and gathers back, trained end to end to decide when to do so. On a number puzzle it solved 83.4% versus 60.0% for long single-threaded thinking in the same context window.

Abstract

Scaling inference-time computation has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of language models. However, existing methods have significant limitations: serialized chain-of-thought approaches generate overly long outputs, leading to increased latency and exhausted context windows, while parallel methods such as self-consistency suffer from insufficient coordination, resulting in redundant computations and limited performance gains. To address these shortcomings, we propose Adaptive Parallel Reasoning (APR), a novel reasoning framework that enables language models to orchestrate both serialized and parallel computations end-to-end. APR generalizes existing reasoning methods by enabling adaptive multi-threaded inference using spawn() and join() operations. A key innovation is our end-to-end reinforcement learning strategy, optimizing both parent and child inference threads to enhance task success rate without requiring predefined reasoning structures. Experiments on the Countdown reasoning task demonstrate significant benefits of APR: (1) higher performance within the same context window (83.4% vs. 60.0% at 4k context); (2) superior scalability with increased computation (80.1% vs. 66.6% at 20k total tokens); (3) improved accuracy at equivalent latency (75.2% vs. 57.3% at approximately 5,000ms). APR represents a step towards enabling language models to autonomously optimize their reasoning processes through adaptive allocation of computation.

Jiayi Pan, Xiuyu Li, Long Lian, Charlie Snell, Yifei Zhou, Adam Yala, Trevor Darrell, Kurt Keutzer, Alane Suhr
arXiv:2504.15466 · cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted Apr 21, 2025 · updated Aug 17, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted at COLM 2025. Code, model, and data are available at https://github.com/Parallel-Reasoning/APR. The first three authors contributed equally to this work

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