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Increasing test-time compute for LLMs shows promise across domains but remains underexplored in code generation, despite extensive study in math. In this paper, we propose S*, the first hybrid test-time scaling framework that substantially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Dacheng Li , Shiyi Cao , Chengkun Cao , Xiuyu Li , Shangyin Tan , Kurt Keutzer , Jiarong Xing , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Ion Stoica

Autoregressive sampling from large language models has led to state-of-the-art results in several natural language tasks. However, autoregressive sampling generates tokens one at a time making it slow, and even prohibitive in certain tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-19 Ziteng Sun , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Jae Hun Ro , Ahmad Beirami , Himanshu Jain , Felix Yu

Inference-time scaling has emerged as a powerful way to improve large language model (LLM) performance by generating multiple candidate responses and selecting among them. However, existing work on dynamic allocation for test-time compute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Jenny Y. Huang , Mehul Damani , Yousef El-Kurdi , Ramon Astudillo , Wei Sun

This paper proposes a novel method that incorporates empowerment when reasoning actions in reinforcement learning (RL), thereby achieving the flexibility of exploration-exploitation dilemma (EED). In previous methods, empowerment for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Taisuke Kobayashi

Test-Time Scaling (TTS) methods for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning often incur substantial computational costs, primarily due to extensive reliance on external Process Reward Models (PRMs) or sampling methods like Best-of-N…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Amirhosein Ghasemabadi , Keith G. Mills , Baochun Li , Di Niu

Inference-time scaling has emerged as a powerful alternative to parameter scaling for improving language model performance on complex reasoning tasks. While existing methods have shown strong performance gains under fixed compute budgets,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Giannis Chatziveroglou

Test-time scaling (TTS) improves large language models (LLMs) by allocating additional compute at inference time. In practice, TTS is often achieved through parallel scaling: generating multiple candidate responses and selecting the best…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Divya Shyamal , Marta Knežević , Lan Tran , Chanakya Ekbote , Vijay Lingam , Paul Pu Liang

Scaling the size of language models to tens of billions of parameters has led to impressive performance on a wide range of tasks. At generation, these models are used auto-regressively, requiring a forward pass for each generated token, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Giovanni Monea , Armand Joulin , Edouard Grave

Scaling model parameters has become the de facto strategy for improving NLP systems, but it comes with substantial computational costs. Test-Time Scaling (TTS) offers an alternative by allocating more computation at inference: generating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Shaomu Tan , Ryosuke Mitani , Ritvik Choudhary , Toshiyuki Sekiya

Scaling test-time compute via parallel sampling can substantially improve LLM reasoning, but is often limited by Best-of-N selection quality. Generative selection methods, such as GenSelect, address this bottleneck, yet strong selection…

Efficient LLM inference research has largely focused on reducing the cost of each decoding step (e.g., using quantization, pruning, or sparse attention), typically applying a uniform computation budget to every generated token. In practice,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yash Akhauri , Mohamed S. Abdelfattah

Decoding sits between a language model and everything we do with it, yet it is still treated as a heuristic knob-tuning exercise. We argue decoding should be understood as a principled optimisation layer: at each token, we solve a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Xiaotong Ji , Rasul Tutunov , Matthieu Zimmer , Haitham Bou-Ammar

Large language models (LLMs) improve reasoning accuracy when generating multiple candidate solutions at test time, but standard methods like Best-of-N (BoN) incur high computational cost by fully generating all branches. Self-Truncation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Sophie Li , Nicholas Huang , Nayan Saxena , Nina Luo , Vincent Lin , Kevin Zhu , Sunishchal Dev

Test-time scaling (TTS) -- the dynamic allocation of compute during inference -- is a promising direction for improving reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, a systematic comparison of well-known TTS strategies under identical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Aradhye Agarwal , Ayan Sengupta , Tanmoy Chakraborty

Recent advances in test-time alignment methods, such as Best-of-N sampling, offer a simple and effective way to steer language models (LMs) toward preferred behaviors using reward models (RM). However, these approaches can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Vinod Raman , Hilal Asi , Satyen Kale

Best-of-N (BoN) sampling, a common strategy for test-time scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs), relies on reward models to select the best candidate solution from multiple generations. However, traditional reward models often assign…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Yantao Liu , Zijun Yao , Rui Min , Yixin Cao , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a widely used approach for blackbox optimization that leverages a Gaussian process (GP) model and an acquisition function to guide future sampling. While effective in low-dimensional settings, BO faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Pavankumar Koratikere , Leifur Leifsson

Test-time scaling methods have seen a rapid increase in popularity for its computational efficiency and parameter-independent training to improve reasoning performance on Large Language Models. One such method is called budget forcing, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Ravindra Aribowo Tarunokusumo , Rafael Fernandes Cunha

Code generation is typically trained in the primal space of programs: a model produces a candidate solution and receives sparse execution feedback, often a single pass/fail bit. Test-time scaling enriches the inference procedure by sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Yizhu Jiao , Ruixiang Zhang , Richard Bai , Jiawei Han , Ronan Collobert , Yizhe Zhang

The new paradigm of test-time scaling has yielded remarkable breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) (e.g. reasoning models) and in generative vision models, allowing models to allocate additional computation during inference to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Luca Eyring , Shyamgopal Karthik , Alexey Dosovitskiy , Nataniel Ruiz , Zeynep Akata