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Related papers: Optimal Self-Consistency for Efficient Reasoning w…

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Test-time scaling seeks to improve the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by adding computational resources. A prevalent approach within the field is sampling-based test-time scaling methods, which enhance reasoning by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Zhi Zhou , Yuhao Tan , Zenan Li , Yuan Yao , Lan-Zhe Guo , Yu-Feng Li , Xiaoxing Ma

Outcome-reward reinforcement learning (RL) is a common and increasingly significant way to refine the step-by-step reasoning of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). In the multiple-choice setting - a dominant format for multimodal…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Jiahao Wang , Weiye Xu , Aijun Yang , Wengang Zhou , Lewei Lu , Houqiang Li , Xiaohua Wang , Jinguo Zhu

Inference-time sampling can elicit strong reasoning abilities from language models without additional training. Existing power-sampling methods do so by sharpening the distribution over full generated outputs, favoring completions that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Aleksei Arzhantsev , Otmane Sakhi , Nicolas Chopin

Self-consistency has emerged as a powerful method for improving the accuracy of short answers generated by large language models. As previously defined, it only concerns the accuracy of a final answer parsed from generated text. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Christopher Malon , Xiaodan Zhu

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in translating natural language questions about relational databases into SQL queries. In particular, test-time scaling techniques such as Self-Consistency and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Lei Sheng , Shuai-Shuai Xu

Chain-of-thought (CoT) has emerged as a critical mechanism for enhancing reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), with self-consistency demonstrating notable promise in boosting performance. However, inherent linguistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Zhiwei Yu , Tuo Li , Changhong Wang , Hui Chen , Lang Zhou

Sampling is a basic operation in many inference-time algorithms of large language models (LLMs). To scale up inference efficiently with a limited compute, it is crucial to find an optimal allocation for sample compute budgets: Which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Kexun Zhang , Shang Zhou , Danqing Wang , William Yang Wang , Lei Li

Increasing test-time computation is a straightforward approach to enhancing the quality of responses in Large Language Models (LLMs). While Best-of-N sampling and Self-Consistency with majority voting are simple and effective, they require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Chengsong Huang , Langlin Huang , Jixuan Leng , Jiacheng Liu , Jiaxin Huang

Scaling test-time computation--generating and analyzing multiple or sequential outputs for a single input--has become a promising strategy for improving the reliability and quality of large language models (LLMs), as evidenced by advances…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Sungjae Lee , Hoyoung Kim , Jeongyeon Hwang , Eunhyeok Park , Jungseul Ok

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

Self-consistency improves reasoning by aggregating diverse stochastic samples, yet the dynamics behind its efficacy remain underexplored. We reframe self-consistency as a dynamic distributional alignment problem, revealing that decoding…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Yiwei Li , Ji Zhang , Shaoxiong Feng , Peiwen Yuan , Xinglin Wang , Jiayi Shi , Yueqi Zhang , Chuyi Tan , Boyuan Pan , Yao Hu , Kan Li

We revisit test-time scaling for language model reasoning and ask a fundamental question: at equal token budget and compute, is it better to run multiple independent chains in parallel, or to run fewer chains that iteratively refine through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Aman Sharma , Paras Chopra

Scaling test-time compute brings substantial performance gains for large language models (LLMs). By sampling multiple answers and heuristically aggregate their answers (e.g., either through majority voting or using verifiers to rank the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Jianing Qi , Xi Ye , Hao Tang , Zhigang Zhu , Eunsol Choi

To enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), self-consistency has become a popular approach, combining multiple samplings with majority voting. However, current methods are computationally expensive and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Jiace Zhu , Yuanzhe Huang , Yingtao Shen , Jie Zhao , An Zou

Scaling the amount of compute used to train language models has dramatically improved their capabilities. However, when it comes to inference, we often limit models to making only one attempt at a problem. Here, we explore inference compute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Bradley Brown , Jordan Juravsky , Ryan Ehrlich , Ronald Clark , Quoc V. Le , Christopher Ré , Azalia Mirhoseini

Inference-time scaling has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing approaches often rely on heuristic strategies for parallel sampling, lacking a principled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Youkang Wang , Jian Wang , Rubing Chen , Xiao-Yong Wei

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

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) integrating explicit reasoning, such as OpenAI's o3-mini, DeepSeek-R1, and QWQ-32B, enable smaller models to solve complex tasks by generating intermediate reasoning steps prior to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Jaeyeon Lee , Guantong Qi , Matthew Brady Neeley , Zhandong Liu , Hyun-Hwan Jeong

Test-time scaling paradigms have significantly advanced the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) on complex tasks. Despite their empirical success, theoretical understanding of the sample efficiency of various test-time strategies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Baihe Huang , Shanda Li , Tianhao Wu , Yiming Yang , Ameet Talwalkar , Kannan Ramchandran , Michael I. Jordan , Jiantao Jiao

Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across various tasks, they remain prone to errors. A key challenge is enabling them to self-correct. While prior research has relied on external tools or large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Viktor Moskvoretskii , Chris Biemann , Irina Nikishina