English

Adaptive Test-Time Compute Allocation via Learned Heuristics over Categorical Structure

Artificial Intelligence 2026-02-05 v1

Abstract

Test-time computation has become a primary driver of progress in large language model (LLM) reasoning, but it is increasingly bottlenecked by expensive verification. In many reasoning systems, a large fraction of verifier calls are spent on redundant or unpromising intermediate hypotheses. We study reasoning under a \emph{verification-cost-limited} setting and ask how verification effort should be allocated across intermediate states. We propose a state-level selective verification framework that combines (i) deterministic feasibility gating over a structured move interface, (ii) pre-verification ranking using a hybrid of learned state-distance and residual scoring, and (iii) adaptive allocation of verifier calls based on local uncertainty. Unlike solution-level best-of-NN or uniform intermediate verification, our method distributes verification where it is most informative. On the \textsc{MATH} benchmark, our approach achieves higher accuracy than best-of-NN, majority voting, and beam search while using 44\% fewer verifier calls.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.03975,
  title  = {Adaptive Test-Time Compute Allocation via Learned Heuristics over Categorical Structure},
  author = {Shuhui Qu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.03975},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:34:59.777Z