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Test-Time Compute (TTC) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) at inference, leveraging strategies such as Test-Time Training (TTT) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-15 J. Pablo Muñoz , Jinjie Yuan

Existing approaches to LLM personalization focus on constructing better personalized models or inputs, while treating inference as a single-shot process. In this work, we study Test-Time Personalization (TTP) along an unexplored axis:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Linhai Zhang , Yulan He

There is intense interest in investigating how inference time compute (ITC) (e.g. repeated sampling, refinements, etc) can improve large language model (LLM) capabilities. At the same time, recent breakthroughs in reasoning models, such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Junlin Wang , Shang Zhu , Jon Saad-Falcon , Ben Athiwaratkun , Qingyang Wu , Jue Wang , Shuaiwen Leon Song , Ce Zhang , Bhuwan Dhingra , James Zou

Inference-time computation offers a powerful axis for scaling the performance of language models. However, naively increasing computation in techniques like Best-of-N sampling can lead to performance degradation due to reward hacking.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Audrey Huang , Adam Block , Qinghua Liu , Nan Jiang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Dylan J. Foster

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

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly progressed into general-purpose agents capable of solving a broad spectrum of tasks. However, current models remain inefficient at reasoning: they apply fixed inference-time compute regardless of…

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

Inference-time methods that aggregate and prune multiple samples have emerged as a powerful paradigm for steering large language models, yet we lack any principled understanding of their accuracy-cost tradeoffs. In this paper, we introduce…

Scaling large language models (LLMs) has driven significant advancements, yet it faces diminishing returns and escalating energy demands. This work explores how test-time compute (TTC) can serve as an energy-efficient complement to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Yunho Jin , Gu-Yeon Wei , David Brooks

Best-of-N (BoN) sampling is a widely used inference-time alignment method for language models, whereby N candidate responses are sampled from a reference model and the one with the highest predicted reward according to a learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Ved Sriraman , Adam Block

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

Test-time scaling (TTS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by allocating additional computation at inference, yet its application to multimodal systems such as…

Test-time training (TTT) adapts model parameters on unlabeled test instances during inference time, which continuously extends capabilities beyond the reach of offline training. Despite initial gains, existing TTT methods for LRMs plateau…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Qingyang Zhang , Xinke Kong , Haitao Wu , Qinghua Hu , Minghao Wu , Baosong Yang , Yu Cheng , Yun Luo , Ganqu Cui , Changqing Zhang

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

Best-of-N selection is a key technique for improving the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) through increased test-time computation. Current state-of-the-art methods often employ computationally intensive reward models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Zhewei Kang , Xuandong Zhao , Dawn Song

Large Language Model (LLM) agents can increasingly automate complex reasoning through Test-Time Scaling (TTS), iterative refinement guided by reward signals. However, many real-world tasks involve multi-stage pipeline whose final outcomes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Shuyu Gan , James Mooney , Pan Hao , Renxiang Wang , Mingyi Hong , Qianwen Wang , Dongyeop Kang

Inference-time scaling has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the reasoning capability of large language models. Among various approaches, Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) has become a particularly important framework,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Youheng Zhu , Yiping Lu

This work presents self-rewarding sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), an inference-time scaling algorithm enabling effective sampling of masked diffusion language models (MDLMs). Our algorithm stems from the observation that most existing MDLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Ziwei Luo , Ziqi Jin , Lei Wang , Lidong Bing , Thomas B. Schön

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

A common paradigm to improve the performance of large language models is optimizing for a reward model. Reward models assign a numerical score to an LLM's output that indicates, for example, how likely it is to align with user preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Hadi Khalaf , Claudio Mayrink Verdun , Alex Oesterling , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Flavio du Pin Calmon
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