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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in diverse real-world scenarios, each governed by bespoke behavioral and safety specifications (spec) custom-tailored by users or organizations. These spec, categorized into safety-spec…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Haoran Zhang , Yafu Li , Xuyang Hu , Dongrui Liu , Zhilin Wang , Bo Li , Yu Cheng

Language models are aligned to emulate the collective voice of many, resulting in outputs that align with no one in particular. Steering LLMs away from generic output is possible through supervised finetuning or RLHF, but requires…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Omar Shaikh , Michelle S. Lam , Joey Hejna , Yijia Shao , Hyundong Cho , Michael S. Bernstein , Diyi Yang

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on mathematical reasoning tasks but remain unreliable on challenging instances. Existing test-time scaling methods, such as repeated sampling, self-correction, and tree search,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Zhimin Lin , Yixin Ji , Jinpeng Li , Yu Luo , Dong Li , Junhua Fang , Juntao Li , Min Zhang

Process reward models (PRMs) are a cornerstone of test-time scaling (TTS), designed to verify and select the best responses from large language models (LLMs). However, this promise is challenged by recent benchmarks where simple majority…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Peng Kuang , Yanli Wang , Xiaoyu Han , Yaowenqi Liu , Kaidi Xu , Haohan Wang

Scaling the test-time compute of large language models has demonstrated impressive performance on reasoning benchmarks. However, existing evaluations of test-time scaling make the strong assumption that a reasoning system should always give…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-21 William Jurayj , Jeffrey Cheng , Benjamin Van Durme

Transformer-based pretrained language models (PLMs) offer unmatched performance across the majority of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, including a body of question answering (QA) tasks. We hypothesize that improvements in QA…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-06 Gabor Fuisz , Ivan Vulić , Samuel Gibbons , Inigo Casanueva , Paweł Budzianowski

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Shuhui Qu

Test-time scaling has emerged as a promising paradigm in language modeling, leveraging additional computational resources at inference time to enhance model performance. In this work, we introduce R2-LLMs, a novel and versatile hierarchical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Alex ZH Dou , Zhongwei Wan , Dongfei Cui , Xin Wang , Jing Xiong , Haokun Lin , Chaofan Tao , Shen Yan , Mi Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities but typically require expensive post-training to reach high performance. Recent test-time alignment methods offer a lightweight alternative, but have been explored mainly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Arushi Rai , Qiang Zhang , Hanqing Zeng , Yunkai Zhang , Dipesh Tamboli , Xiangjun Fan , Zhuokai Zhao , Lizhu Zhang

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has become a critical step in their development. Recent research has increasingly focused on test-time alignment, where additional compute is allocated during inference to enhance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Bolian Li , Yanran Wu , Xinyu Luo , Ruqi Zhang

Training models to effectively use test-time compute is crucial for improving the reasoning performance of LLMs. Current methods mostly do so via fine-tuning on search traces or running RL with 0/1 outcome reward, but do these approaches…

The emergence of large Vision Language Models (VLMs) has broadened the scope and capabilities of single-modal Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating visual modalities, thereby unlocking transformative cross-modal applications in a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Shuo Xing , Peiran Li , Yuping Wang , Ruizheng Bai , Yueqi Wang , Chan-Wei Hu , Chengxuan Qian , Huaxiu Yao , Zhengzhong Tu

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) with principles like helpfulness, honesty, and harmlessness typically relies on scalar rewards that obscure which objectives drive the training signal. We introduce QA-LIGN, which decomposes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Jacob Dineen , Aswin RRV , Qin Liu , Zhikun Xu , Xiao Ye , Ming Shen , Zhaonan Li , Shijie Lu , Chitta Baral , Muhao Chen , Ben Zhou

State-of-the-art pre-trained language models (PLMs) outperform other models when applied to the majority of language processing tasks. However, PLMs have been found to degrade in performance under distribution shift, a phenomenon that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Ayush Singh , John E. Ortega

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on extensive multilingual corpora to acquire both language-specific cultural knowledge and general knowledge. Ideally, while LLMs should provide consistent responses to culture-independent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Yumeng Wang , Zhiyuan Fan , Qingyun Wang , May Fung , Heng Ji

While textless Spoken Language Models (SLMs) have shown potential in end-to-end speech-to-speech modeling, they still lag behind text-based Large Language Models (LLMs) in terms of semantic coherence and relevance. This work introduces the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Guan-Ting Lin , Prashanth Gurunath Shivakumar , Aditya Gourav , Yile Gu , Ankur Gandhe , Hung-yi Lee , Ivan Bulyko

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) highlights the power of scaling test-time compute to achieve strong performance on complex tasks, such as mathematical reasoning and code generation. This raises a critical question: how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Feng Chen , Allan Raventos , Nan Cheng , Surya Ganguli , Shaul Druckmann

Test-time adaptation with pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) has attracted increasing attention for tackling the issue of distribution shift during the test phase. While prior methods have shown effectiveness in addressing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Baoshun Tong , Kaiyu Song , Hanjiang Lai

The sequential nature of modern LLMs makes them expensive and slow, and speculative sampling has proven to be an effective solution to this problem. Methods like EAGLE perform autoregression at the feature level, reusing top-layer features…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Yuhui Li , Fangyun Wei , Chao Zhang , Hongyang Zhang

Pre-trained large-scale language models (LLMs) excel at producing coherent articles, yet their outputs may be untruthful, toxic, or fail to align with user expectations. Current approaches focus on using reinforcement learning with human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Dehong Xu , Liang Qiu , Minseok Kim , Faisal Ladhak , Jaeyoung Do