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Related papers: On the Limits of Test-Time Compute: Sequential Rew…

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We address the problem of incremental sequence classification, where predictions are updated as new elements in the sequence are revealed. Drawing on temporal-difference learning from reinforcement learning, we identify a…

Test-time scaling has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex reasoning, yet the limitations of current Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation obscures whether performance gains stem from genuine reasoning or mere verbosity. To…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zhizhang Fu , Yuancheng Gu , Chenkai Hu , Hanmeng Liu , Yue Zhang

Backtesting large language models on historical events requires reasoning exclusively from information available before a specified cutoff date. Yet models routinely leak post-cutoff knowledge from pre-training into their reasoning,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Zeyu Zhang , Bradly C. Stadie

Chain-of-thought and more broadly test-time compute are known to augment the expressive capabilities of language models and have led to major innovations in reasoning. Motivated by this success, this paper explores latent chain-of-thought…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Carson Dudley , Samet Oymak

Deploying models on target domain data subject to distribution shift requires adaptation. Test-time training (TTT) emerges as a solution to this adaptation under a realistic scenario where access to full source domain data is not available…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Yongyi Su , Xun Xu , Kui Jia

Best-of-N (BoN) is a popular and effective algorithm for aligning language models to human preferences. The algorithm works as follows: at inference time, N samples are drawn from the language model, and the sample with the highest reward,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Afra Amini , Tim Vieira , Elliott Ash , Ryan Cotterell

Test-Time Scaling (TTS) improves the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by allocating additional compute during inference. We conduct a structured survey of TTS methods and categorize them into sampling-based,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Ho-Lam Chung , Teng-Yun Hsiao , Hsiao-Ying Huang , Chunerh Cho , Jian-Ren Lin , Zhang Ziwei , Yun-Nung Chen

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

The next token prediction loss is the dominant self-supervised training objective for large language models and has achieved promising results in a variety of downstream tasks. However, upon closer investigation of this objective, we find…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Zhili Feng , Dhananjay Ram , Cole Hawkins , Aditya Rawal , Jinman Zhao , Sheng Zha

Test case prioritisation (TCP) is a critical task in regression testing to ensure quality as software evolves. Machine learning has become a common way to achieve it. In particular, learning-to-rank (LTR) algorithms provide an effective…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Aurora Ramírez , Mario Berrios , José Raúl Romero , Robert Feldt

Logical reasoning is a critical benchmark for evaluating the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), as it reflects their ability to derive valid conclusions from given premises. While the combination of test-time scaling with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Ramya Keerthy Thatikonda , Wray Buntine , Ehsan Shareghi

Inference-time computation has emerged as a promising scaling axis for improving large language model reasoning. However, despite yielding impressive performance, the optimal allocation of inference-time computation remains poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Parsa Mirtaheri , Ezra Edelman , Samy Jelassi , Eran Malach , Enric Boix-Adsera

Recently, scaling test-time compute on Large Language Models (LLM) has garnered wide attention. However, there has been limited investigation of how various reasoning prompting strategies perform as scaling. In this paper, we focus on a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-18 Yexiang Liu , Zekun Li , Zhi Fang , Nan Xu , Ran He , Tieniu Tan

Although LLMs have demonstrated improved performance by scaling parallel test-time compute, doing so relies on generating reasoning paths that are both diverse and accurate. For challenging problems, the forking tokens that trigger diverse…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Sheng Jia , Xiao Wang , Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan

A simple yet effective method for inference-time alignment of generative models is Best-of-$N$ (BoN), where $N$ outcomes are sampled from a reference policy, evaluated using a proxy reward model, and the highest-scoring one is selected.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-09 Gholamali Aminian , Idan Shenfeld , Amir R. Asadi , Ahmad Beirami , Youssef Mroueh

Confidence bounds are an essential tool for rigorously quantifying the uncertainty of predictions. They are a core component in many sequential learning and decision-making algorithms, with tighter confidence bounds giving rise to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-12 Hamish Flynn , David Reeb

Scaling test-time computation with reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a reliable path to improve large language models (LLM) reasoning ability. Yet, outcome-based reward often incentivizes models to be overconfident, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Liaoyaqi Wang , Chunsheng Zuo , William Jurayj , Benjamin Van Durme , Anqi Liu

Reward models play a critical role in guiding large language models toward outputs that align with human expectations. However, an open challenge remains in effectively utilizing test-time compute to enhance reward model performance. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Jiaxin Guo , Zewen Chi , Li Dong , Qingxiu Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Furu Wei

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

Test-time compute can be scaled both sequentially and in parallel. Sequential scaling involves lengthening the generation process, while parallel scaling involves verifying and selecting among multiple candidate outputs. Combining these two…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Weihao Zeng , Keqing He , Chuqiao Kuang , Xiaoguang Li , Junxian He
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