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Since the inception of Large Language Models (LLMs), the quest to efficiently train them for superior reasoning capabilities has been a pivotal challenge. The dominant training paradigm for LLMs is based on next token prediction (NTP).…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Pengxiao Lin , Zhongwang Zhang , Zhi-Qin John Xu

Learning the minimum/maximum mean among a finite set of distributions is a fundamental sub-task in planning, game tree search and reinforcement learning. We formalize this learning task as the problem of sequentially testing how the minimum…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-05 Emilie Kaufmann , Wouter Koolen , Aurelien Garivier

A key paradigm to improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is to allocate more inference-time compute to search against a verifier or reward model. This process can then be utilized to refine the pretrained model…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Juno Kim , Denny Wu , Jason Lee , Taiji Suzuki

Test-time scaling (TTS) has been shown to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) by sampling and aggregating diverse reasoning paths. However, existing research has overlooked a critical issue: selection bias of reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Zongqian Wu , Baoduo Xu , Tianyu Li , Zhu Sun , Xiaofeng Zhu , Lei Feng

Large Language Models have demonstrated outstanding performance across various downstream tasks and have been widely applied in multiple scenarios. Human-annotated preference data is used for training to further improve LLMs' performance,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Shimao Zhang , Xiao Liu , Xin Zhang , Junxiao Liu , Zheheng Luo , Shujian Huang , Yeyun Gong

Test-time scaling (TTS) has recently emerged as a promising direction to exploit the hidden reasoning capabilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs). However, existing scaling methods narrowly focus on the compute-optimal…

Performance · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Youpeng Zhao , Jinpeng LV , Di Wu , Jun Wang , Christopher Gooley

Scaling test-time compute has driven the recent advances in the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), typically by allocating additional computation for more thorough exploration. However, increased compute often comes at…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Mert Cemri , Nived Rajaraman , Rishabh Tiwari , Xiaoxuan Liu , Kurt Keutzer , Ion Stoica , Kannan Ramchandran , Ahmad Beirami , Ziteng Sun

Test-time scaling (TTS) has become a prevalent technique in image generation, significantly boosting output quality by expanding the number of parallel samples and filtering them using pre-trained reward models. However, applying this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Hang Xu , Linjiang Huang , Feng Zhao

Foundation models compress a large amount of information in a single, large neural network, which can then be queried for individual tasks. There are strong parallels between this widespread framework and offline goal-conditioned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Marco Bagatella , Mert Albaba , Jonas Hübotter , Georg Martius , Andreas Krause

Inference-time scaling has achieved remarkable success in language models, yet its adaptation to diffusion models remains underexplored. We observe that the efficacy of recent Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC)-based methods largely stems from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Xun Su , Jianming Huang , Yang Yusen , Zhongxi Fang , Hiroyuki Kasai

Test-time scaling enhances large language model performance by allocating additional compute resources during inference. Best-of-N (BoN) sampling serves as a common sampling-based scaling technique, broadening the search space in parallel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yiming Wang , Pei Zhang , Siyuan Huang , Baosong Yang , Zhuosheng Zhang , Fei Huang , Rui Wang

Scaling test-time compute via parallel sampling can substantially improve LLM reasoning, but is often limited by Best-of-N selection quality. Generative selection methods, such as GenSelect, address this bottleneck, yet strong selection…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in complex reasoning tasks, largely enabled by test-time scaling (TTS) paradigms that allocate additional compute during inference. Among these, external TTS (particularly the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Bin Yu , Xinming Wang , Shijie Lian , Haotian Li , Changti Wu , Ruina Hu , Bailing Wang , Yuliang Wei , Kai Chen

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

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved their reasoning abilities, particularly through techniques involving search and backtracking. Backtracking naturally scales test-time compute by enabling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Tian Qin , David Alvarez-Melis , Samy Jelassi , Eran Malach

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities by scaling test-time compute via long Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, recent findings suggest that raw token counts are unreliable proxies for reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Wei-Lin Chen , Liqian Peng , Tian Tan , Chao Zhao , Blake JianHang Chen , Ziqian Lin , Alec Go , Yu Meng

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

Parallel test-time scaling (TTS) is a pivotal approach for enhancing large language models (LLMs), typically by sampling multiple token-based chains-of-thought in parallel and aggregating outcomes through voting or search. Recent advances…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Runyang You , Yongqi Li , Meng Liu , Wenjie Wang , Liqiang Nie , Wenjie Li

Inference-time scaling techniques have shown promise in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While recent research has primarily focused on training-time optimization, our work highlights inference-time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Jiachun Li , Pengfei Cao , Zhuoran Jin , Yubo Chen , Jiexin Xu , Huaijun Li , Xiaojian Jiang , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into the software engineering ecosystem. Their test-time compute (TTC) reasoning capabilities show significant potential for understanding program logic and semantics beyond mere…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Yifeng He , Luning Yang , Christopher Castro Gaw Gonzalo , Hao Chen