English
Related papers

Related papers: Thinking Long, but Short: Stable Sequential Test-T…

200 papers

As language model (LM) outputs get more and more natural, it is becoming more difficult than ever to evaluate their quality. Simultaneously, increasing LMs' "thinking" time through scaling test-time compute has proven an effective technique…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by prompting intermediate steps, improving accuracy and robustness in arithmetic, logic, and commonsense tasks. However, this benefit comes with high computational…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Kerui Huang , Shuhan Liu , Xing Hu , Tongtong Xu , Lingfeng Bao , Xin Xia

We construct evaluation tasks where extending the reasoning length of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) deteriorates performance, exhibiting an inverse scaling relationship between test-time compute and accuracy. Our evaluation tasks span four…

Sampling-based search, a simple paradigm for utilizing test-time compute, involves generating multiple candidate responses and selecting the best one -- typically by having models self-verify each response for correctness. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Eric Zhao , Pranjal Awasthi , Sreenivas Gollapudi

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a range of natural language processing tasks. However, recent advances demonstrate that further gains particularly in complex reasoning tasks require more than merely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Wei Huang , Yizhe Xiong , Xin Ye , Zhijie Deng , Hui Chen , Zijia Lin , Guiguang Ding

Reasoning reinforcement learning (RL) has recently revealed a new scaling effect: test-time scaling. Thinking models such as R1 and o1 improve their reasoning accuracy at test time as the length of the reasoning context increases. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Chao Yu , Qixin Tan , Jiaxuan Gao , Shi Yu , Hong Lu , Xinting Yang , Zelai Xu , Yu Wang , Yi Wu , Eugene Vinitsky

We propose cache steering, a lightweight method for implicit steering of language models via a one-shot intervention applied directly to the key-value cache. To validate its effectiveness, we apply cache steering to induce chain-of-thought…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Max Belitsky , Dawid J. Kopiczko , Michael Dorkenwald , M. Jehanzeb Mirza , James R. Glass , Cees G. M. Snoek , Yuki M. Asano

Test-time scaling has emerged as a promising paradigm in language modeling, wherein additional computational resources are allocated during inference to enhance model performance. Recent approaches, such as DeepConf, have demonstrated the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Hongwei Chen , Yishu Lei , Dan Zhang , Bo Ke , Danxiang Zhu , Xuyi Chen , Yuxiang Lu , Zhengjie Huang , Shikun Feng , Jingzhou He , Yu Sun , Hua Wu , Haifeng Wang

Recently, Test-Time Scaling (TTS) has gained increasing attention for improving LLM reasoning performance at test time without retraining the model. A notable TTS technique is Self-Consistency (SC), which generates multiple reasoning chains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Colin Hong , Xu Guo , Anand Chaanan Singh , Esha Choukse , Dmitrii Ustiugov

Listwise reranking utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved state-of-the-art retrieval effectiveness. Recently, reasoning-enhanced models have further pushed these boundaries by employing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to perform deep…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Danyang Liu , Kan Li

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances language models' performance but often leads to inefficient "overthinking" on simple problems. We identify that existing approaches directly penalizing reasoning length fail to account for varying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Junjie Yang , Ke Lin , Xing Yu

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning abilities, while smaller models (<= 3B parameters) significantly underperform on multi-step reasoning tasks. Based on empirical analyses of the Qwen-2.5 model…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yang Ouyang , Shuhang Lin , Jung-Eun Kim

Recent studies show that the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be improved by applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to question-answering (QA) tasks in areas such as math and coding. With a long context length, LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Stephen Chung , Wenyu Du , Jie Fu

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

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning but often produces long and redundant traces that substantially increase inference cost. We present SyncThink, a training-free and plug-and-play decoding method that reduces CoT overhead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Gengyang Li , Wang Cai , Yifeng Gao , Yunfang Wu

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), such as DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI-o1, have demonstrated the significant effectiveness of test-time scaling, achieving substantial performance gains across various benchmarks. These advanced…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Haotian Wang , Han Zhao , Shuaiting Chen , Xiaoyu Tian , Sitong Zhao , Yunjie Ji , Yiping Peng , Xiangang Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) often rely on long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex tasks. While effective, these trajectories are frequently inefficient, leading to high latency from excessive token generation, or unstable…

Recent work on test-time scaling for large language model (LLM) reasoning typically assumes that allocating more inference-time computation uniformly improves correctness. However, prior studies show that reasoning uncertainty is highly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Lexiang Tang , Weihao Gao , Bingchen Zhao , Lu Ma , Qiao jin , Bang Yang , Yuexian Zou

Reinforcement learning substantially improves reasoning in large language models, but it also tends to lengthen chain of thought outputs and increase computational cost during both training and inference. Though length control methods have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Daisuke Nohara , Taishi Nakamura , Rio Yokota

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