R2R: Efficiently Navigating Divergent Reasoning Paths with Small-Large Model Token Routing

Tianyu Fu, Yi Ge, Yichen You, Enshu Liu, Zhihang Yuan, Guohao Dai, Shengen Yan, Huazhong Yang, Yu Wang

Keywords: LLM, efficient reasoning, long context

TL;DR: We train a token-level neural router to let SLM following LLM reasoning paths by replacing only divergent tokens

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve impressive reasoning capabilities at the cost of substantial inference overhead, posing substantial deployment challenges. Although distilled Small Language Models (SLMs) significantly enhance efficiency, their performance suffers as they fail to follow LLMs' reasoning paths. Luckily, we reveal that only a small fraction of tokens genuinely diverge reasoning paths between LLMs and SLMs. Most generated tokens are either identical or exhibit neutral differences, such as minor variations in abbreviations or expressions. Leveraging this insight, we introduce **Roads to Rome (R2R)**, a neural token router that selectively utilizes LLMs only for these critical, path-divergent tokens, while leaving the majority of token generation to the SLM. We also develop an automatic data generation pipeline that identifies divergent tokens and generates token-level routing labels to train the lightweight router. We apply R2R to combine R1-1.5B and R1-32B models from the DeepSeek family, and evaluate on challenging math, coding, and QA benchmarks. With an average activated parameter size of 5.6B, R2R surpasses the average accuracy of R1-7B by 1.6×, outperforming even the R1-14B model. Compared to R1-32B, it delivers a 2.8× wall-clock speedup with comparable performance, advancing the Pareto frontier of test-time scaling efficiency.

Primary Area: Deep learning (e.g., architectures, generative models, optimization for deep networks, foundation models, LLMs)

Submission Number: 6704