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Verifiers or reward models are often used to enhance the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs). A common approach is the Best-of-N method, where N candidate solutions generated by the LLM are ranked by a verifier, and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Lunjun Zhang , Arian Hosseini , Hritik Bansal , Mehran Kazemi , Aviral Kumar , Rishabh Agarwal

Large Language Models (LLMs) consistently benefit from scaled Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, but also suffer from heavy computational overhead. To address this issue, efficient reasoning aims to incentivize short yet accurate thinking…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Taiqiang Wu , Zenan Xu , Bo Zhou , Ngai Wong

Modern preference alignment techniques, such as Best-of-N (BoN) sampling, rely on reward models trained with pairwise comparison data. While effective at learning relative preferences, this paradigm fails to capture a signal of response…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-14 Hyung Gyu Rho , Sian Lee

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly relied upon for solving complex reasoning tasks in domains such as mathematics, logic, and multi-step question answering. A growing line of work seeks to improve reasoning quality by scaling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Seyyed Saeid Cheshmi , Azal Ahmad Khan , Xinran Wang , Zirui Liu , Ali Anwar

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit strong linguistic abilities while remaining unreliable on multi-step reasoning tasks, particularly when deployed without additional training or fine-tuning. In this work, we study inference-time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Vinay Sharma , Manish Jain

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve impressive reasoning capabilities by generating lengthy chain-of-thoughts, but this "overthinking" incurs high latency and cost without commensurate accuracy gains. In this work, we introduce AALC, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Ruosen Li , Ziming Luo , Quan Zhang , Ruochen Li , Ben Zhou , Ali Payani , Xinya Du

Recently, test-time scaling has garnered significant attention from the research community, largely due to the substantial advancements of the o1 model released by OpenAI. By allocating more computational resources during the inference…

Large language models (LLMs) achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on complex reasoning tasks by generating multiple chain-of-thought (CoT) traces, but using a fixed token budget per query leads to over-computation on easy inputs and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Katrina Brown , Aneesh Muppidi , Rana Shahout

This paper introduces a novel Bayesian learning model to explain the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on their core optimization metric of next token prediction. We develop a theoretical framework based on an ideal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Siddhartha Dalal , Vishal Misra

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

Pandora's Box is a central problem in decision making under uncertainty that can model various real life scenarios. In this problem we are given $n$ boxes, each with a fixed opening cost, and an unknown value drawn from a known…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Evangelia Gergatsouli , Christos Tzamos

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced code generation efficiency, they face inherent challenges in balancing performance and inference costs across diverse programming tasks. Dynamically selecting the optimal LLM…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Junhang Cheng , Fang Liu , Chengru Wu , Li Zhang

Various algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL) exhibit dramatic variation in their convergence rates as a function of problem structure. Such problem-dependent behavior is not captured by worst-case analyses and has accordingly inspired…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-24 Koulik Khamaru , Eric Xia , Martin J. Wainwright , Michael I. Jordan

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) for chain-of-thought reasoning presents a significant challenge: supervised fine-tuning on a single "golden" rationale hurts generalization as it penalizes equally valid alternatives, whereas…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Mingye Zhu , Yi Liu , Zheren Fu , Quan Wang , Yongdong Zhang

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made reasoning a central benchmark for evaluating intelligence. While prior surveys focus on efficiency by examining how to shorten reasoning chains or reduce computation, this view…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Chao Wu , Baoheng Li , Mingchen Gao , Yu Tian , Zhenyi Wang

Driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), a growing literature has demonstrated the potential for using large language models (LLMs) as scalable surrogates to generate human-like responses in many business applications. Two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Lei Wang , Zikun Ye , Jinglong Zhao

Tool-using agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in tasks such as mathematical reasoning and multi-hop question answering. However, in long trajectories, agents often trigger excessive and low-quality tool calls, increasing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Zeping Li , Hongru Wang , Yiwen Zhao , Guanhua Chen , Yixia Li , Keyang Chen , Yixin Cao , Guangnan Ye , Hongfeng Chai , Zhenfei Yin

Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered considerable attention owing to their remarkable capabilities, leading to an increasing number of companies offering LLMs as services. Different LLMs achieve different performance at different…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Yueyue Liu , Hongyu Zhang , Yuantian Miao , Van-Hoang Le , Zhiqiang Li

With the rapid advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), aligning LLMs with human preferences become increasingly important. Although Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) proves effective, it is complicated and highly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Shiqi Wang , Zhengze Zhang , Rui Zhao , Fei Tan , Cam Tu Nguyen

Prompt optimization methods have demonstrated significant effectiveness in aligning black-box large language models (LLMs). In parallel, inference scaling strategies such as Best-of-N Sampling and Majority Voting have likewise been shown to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Saaduddin Mahmud , Mason Nakamura , Kyle Hollins Wray , Shlomo Zilberstein