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Ranking Reasoning LLMs under Test-Time Scaling

Machine Learning 2026-05-12 v1 Statistics Theory Statistics Theory

Abstract

Test-time scaling evaluates reasoning LLMs by sampling multiple outputs per prompt, but ranking models in this regime remains underexplored. We formalize dense benchmark ranking under test-time scaling and introduce Scorio, a library that implements statistical ranking methods such as paired-comparison models, item response theory (IRT) models, voting rules, and graph- and spectral-based methods. Across 2020 reasoning models on four Olympiad-style math benchmarks (AIME'24, AIME'25, HMMT'25, and BrUMO'25; up to N=80N=80 trials), most full-trial rankings agree closely with the Bayesian gold standard BayesU@80\mathrm{Bayes}_{\mathcal{U}}@80 (mean Kendall's τb=0.93\tau_b = 0.93--0.950.95), and 1919--3434 methods recover exactly the same ordering. In the single-trial regime, the best methods reach τb0.86\tau_b \approx 0.86. Using greedy decoding as an empirical prior (BayesR0@N\mathrm{Bayes}_{\mathbf{R}_0}@N) reduces variance at N=1N=1 by 1616--52%52\%, but can bias rankings when greedy and stochastic sampling disagree. These results identify reliable ranking methods for both high- and low-budget test-time scaling. We release Scorio as an open-source library at https://github.com/mohsenhariri/scorio.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.10960,
  title  = {Ranking Reasoning LLMs under Test-Time Scaling},
  author = {Mohsen Hariri and Michael Hinczewski and Jing Ma and Vipin Chaudhary},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.10960},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Code is available at https://github.com/mohsenhariri/scorio

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:14:59.260Z