English
Related papers

Related papers: Optimal Stopping vs Best-of-$N$ for Inference Time…

200 papers

Weitzman (1979) introduced the Pandora Box problem as a model for sequential search with inspection costs, and gave an elegant index-based policy that attains provably optimal expected payoff. In various scenarios, the searching agent may…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Hu Fu , Jiawei Li , Daogao Liu

We introduce a novel approach to large language model (LLM) distillation by formulating it as a constrained reinforcement learning problem. While recent work has begun exploring the integration of task-specific rewards into distillation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Matthieu Zimmer , Xiaotong Ji , Tu Nguyen , Haitham Bou Ammar

In this paper, we study the optimal stopping problem in the so-called exploratory framework, in which the agent takes actions randomly conditioning on current state and an entropy-regularized term is added to the reward functional. Such a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-04 Yuchao Dong

Non-stationary environments are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms. If the state transition and/or reward functions change based on latent factors, the agent is effectively tasked with optimizing a behavior that maximizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Lucas N. Alegre , Ana L. C. Bazzan , Bruno C. da Silva

Recent developments in large language models have shown advantages in reallocating a notable share of computational resource from training time to inference time. However, the principles behind inference time scaling are not well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Indranil Halder , Cengiz Pehlevan

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across various visual understanding and reasoning tasks, driven by incorporating image representations into the token inputs of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, their…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Kevin Y. Li , Sachin Goyal , Joao D. Semedo , J. Zico Kolter

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) learns optimal policies from fixed datasets, training a policy once and deploying it at inference time without further refinement. Inspired by model predictive control (MPC), we introduce an inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Rohan Deb , Stephen J. Wright , Arindam Banerjee

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in reasoning. However, maximizing their potential through inference-time scaling faces challenges in trade-off between sampling budget and reasoning quality. Current…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Rongman Xu , Yifei Li , Tianzhe Zhao , Yanrui Wu , Bo Li , Hang Yan

Reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) enable test-time scaling, with dataset-level accuracy improving as the token budget increases, motivating adaptive reasoning -- spending tokens when they improve reliability and stopping early when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Xi Wang , Anushri Suresh , Alvin Zhang , Rishi More , William Jurayj , Benjamin Van Durme , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Daniel Khashabi , Eric Nalisnick

Recent work has demonstrated the remarkable potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in test-time scaling. By making models think before answering, they are able to achieve much higher accuracy with extra inference computation. However, in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Yi Sun , Han Wang , Jiaqiang Li , Jiacheng Liu , Xiangyu Li , Hao Wen , Yizhen Yuan , Huiwen Zheng , Yan Liang , Yuanchun Li , Yunxin Liu

Enabling LLMs to improve their outputs by using more test-time computation is a critical step towards building generally self-improving agents that can operate on open-ended natural language. In this paper, we study the scaling of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-07 Charlie Snell , Jaehoon Lee , Kelvin Xu , Aviral Kumar

One of the most striking findings in modern research on large language models (LLMs) is that scaling up compute during training leads to better results. However, less attention has been given to the benefits of scaling compute during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Sean Welleck , Amanda Bertsch , Matthew Finlayson , Hailey Schoelkopf , Alex Xie , Graham Neubig , Ilia Kulikov , Zaid Harchaoui

There emerges a promising trend of using large language models (LLMs) to generate code-like plans for complex inference tasks such as visual reasoning. This paradigm, known as LLM-based planning, provides flexibility in problem solving and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Pengbo Hu , Ji Qi , Xingyu Li , Hong Li , Xinqi Wang , Bing Quan , Ruiyu Wang , Yi Zhou

Many applications of large language models (LLMs) require deductive reasoning, yet models frequently produce incorrect or redundant inference steps. We frame natural language inference as a search problem where the final answer is the valid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Andreas Opedal , Francesco Ignazio Re , Abulhair Saparov , Mrinmaya Sachan , Bernhard Schölkopf , Ryan Cotterell

Computationally intensive decoding procedures--including search, reranking, and self-critique--can improve the quality of language model (LM) outputs in problems spanning code generation, numerical reasoning, and dialog. Existing work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Mehul Damani , Idan Shenfeld , Andi Peng , Andreea Bobu , Jacob Andreas

Large language models (LLMs) are known for their exceptional performance across a range of natural language processing tasks, but their deployment comes at a high computational and financial cost. On the other hand, smaller language models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Adarsh MS , Jithin VG , Ditto PS

This tutorial provides an in-depth guide on inference-time guidance and alignment methods for optimizing downstream reward functions in diffusion models. While diffusion models are renowned for their generative modeling capabilities,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Masatoshi Uehara , Yulai Zhao , Chenyu Wang , Xiner Li , Aviv Regev , Sergey Levine , Tommaso Biancalani

We study self-rewarding reasoning large language models (LLMs), which can simultaneously generate step-by-step reasoning and evaluate the correctness of their outputs during the inference time-without external feedback. This integrated…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Wei Xiong , Hanning Zhang , Chenlu Ye , Lichang Chen , Nan Jiang , Tong Zhang

Modern large language model (LLM) inference engines optimize throughput and latency under fixed decoding rules, treating generation as a linear progression in token time. We propose a fundamentally different paradigm: entropic\-time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Andrew Kiruluta

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) allocate substantial inference-time compute to Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, improving performance on mathematics, scientific QA, and tool usage. However, this introduces overthinking: LRMs often reach a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Sangjun Song , Minjae Oh , Seungkyu Lee , Sungmin Jo , Yohan Jo