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LLM inference often generates a batch of candidates for a prompt and selects one via strategies like majority voting or Best-of- N (BoN). For difficult tasks, this single-shot selection often underperforms. Consequently, evaluations…

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong reasoning performance by allocating substantial computation at inference time, often generating long and verbose reasoning traces. While recent work on efficient reasoning reduces this overhead…

While reasoning large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across various tasks, they also contain notable security vulnerabilities. Recent research has uncovered a "thinking-stopped" vulnerability in DeepSeek-R1, where…

In this work, we investigate the merits of explicitly optimizing for inference time algorithmic performance during model training. We show how optimizing for inference time performance can improve overall model efficacy. We consider generic…

Prompt engineering is a challenging and important task due to the high sensitivity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the given prompt and the inherent ambiguity of a textual task instruction. Automatic prompt engineering is essential to…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) enhances Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning but suffers from advantage collapse on ``hard samples'' where all rollouts fail. This lack of variance eliminates crucial learning signals.…

Customizing an LLM judge to a specific task or domain often involves optimizing its prompt across multiple evaluation criteria simultaneously. Textual gradient methods automate this for a single judge criterion, however they produce…

Despite the strong reasoning ability of large language models~(LLMs), they are prone to errors and hallucinations. As a result, how to check their outputs effectively and efficiently has become a critical problem in their applications.…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable problem-solving and basic mathematics abilities. However, their efficacy is highly contingent on the formulation of the prompt. This study endeavors to quantify the influence of…

Many applications of large language models (LLMs) require deductive reasoning, yet models frequently produce incorrect or redundant inference steps. We frame natural language inference as a search problem where the final answer is the valid…

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.…

Prompt optimization methods have demonstrated significant effectiveness in aligning black-box large language models (LLMs). In parallel, inference scaling strategies such as Best-of-N Sampling and Majority Voting have likewise been shown to…

Recently, advanced large language models (LLMs) have emerged at an increasingly rapid pace. However, when faced with complex problems, most users are often unable to provide accurate and effective prompts to interact with LLMs, thus…

Evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) applications differs from traditional software testing because outputs are stochastic, high-dimensional, and sensitive to prompt and model changes. We present an evaluation-driven workflow - Define,…

Majority voting over multiple LLM attempts improves mathematical reasoning, but correlated errors limit the effective sample size. A natural fix is to assign different reasoning strategies to different voters. The approach, Diverse Prompt…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive success on many benchmarks for mathematical reasoning. However, there is growing concern that some of this performance actually reflects dataset contamination, where data closely…

We investigate the performance of large language models on repetitive deterministic prediction tasks and study how the sequence accuracy rate scales with output length. Each such task involves repeating the same operation n times. Examples…

Instruction following aims to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent by specifying explicit constraints on how tasks should be performed. However, we reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon: instruction following can…

Large Language Models (LLMs) changed the way we design and interact with software systems. Their ability to process and extract information from text has drastically improved productivity in a number of routine tasks. Developers that want…

LLM-based Automatic Prompt Optimization, which typically utilizes LLMs as Prompt Optimizers to self-reflect and refine prompts, has shown promising performance in recent studies. Despite the success, the underlying mechanism of this…