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Adaptive Test-Time Compute Allocation with Evolving In-Context Demonstrations

Artificial Intelligence 2026-04-24 v1

Abstract

While scaling test-time compute can substantially improve model performance, existing approaches either rely on static compute allocation or sample from fixed generation distributions. In this work, we introduce a test-time compute allocation framework that jointly adapts where computation is spent and how generation is performed. Our method begins with a warm-up phase that identifies easy queries and assembles an initial pool of question-response pairs from the test set itself. An adaptive phase then concentrates further computation on unresolved queries while reshaping their generation distributions through evolving in-context demonstrations -- conditioning each generation on successful responses from semantically related queries rather than resampling from a fixed distribution. Experiments across math, coding, and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines while consuming substantially less inference-time compute.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.21018,
  title  = {Adaptive Test-Time Compute Allocation with Evolving In-Context Demonstrations},
  author = {Bowen Zuo and Dongruo Zhou and Yinglun Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.21018},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:31:18.980Z