PENCIL: Long Thoughts with Short Memory

Abstract

While state-of-the-art LLMs have demonstrated great promise of using long Chains-of-Thought (CoT) to boost reasoning, scaling it up to more challenging problems at test-time is fundamentally limited by suboptimal memory usage -- intermediate computations accumulate indefinitely in context even when no longer needed for future thoughts. We introduce PENCIL, which incorporates a novel reduction mechanism into the autoregressive generation process that recursively cleans up intermediate thoughts based on patterns learned from training. By iteratively generating and erasing thoughts, PENCIL can think deeper to solve harder problems using shorter context and less compute. Empirically, we observe PENCIL is significantly more effective and efficient than CoT. For example, we demonstrate PENCIL with a small 25M-parameter transformer and 2048 context length solves Einstein's puzzle -- a task that challenges much larger models like GPT-4. Theoretically, we prove PENCIL can perform universal efficient computation by simulating any Turing machines with optimal time and space complexity, and thus can solve arbitrary computable tasks that are otherwise intractable for vanilla CoT.