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Related papers: Self-Consistency via Marginal Sharpening

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Test-time compute has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the performance of large language models (LLMs), where generating multiple outputs or refining individual chains can significantly boost answer accuracy. However, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Sheng Liu , Tianlang Chen , Pan Lu , Haotian Ye , Yizheng Chen , Lei Xing , James Zou

Scaling the test-time compute of large language models has demonstrated impressive performance on reasoning benchmarks. However, existing evaluations of test-time scaling make the strong assumption that a reasoning system should always give…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-21 William Jurayj , Jeffrey Cheng , Benjamin Van Durme

Large language models (LLMs) now exhibit strong multi-step reasoning abilities, but existing inference-time scaling methods remain computationally expensive, often relying on extensive sampling or external evaluators. We propose a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Nicolas Legrand , Kenneth Enevoldsen , Márton Kardos , Kristoffer Nielbo

Chain-of-thought prompting combined with pre-trained large language models has achieved encouraging results on complex reasoning tasks. In this paper, we propose a new decoding strategy, self-consistency, to replace the naive greedy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Xuezhi Wang , Jason Wei , Dale Schuurmans , Quoc Le , Ed Chi , Sharan Narang , Aakanksha Chowdhery , Denny Zhou

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

Recent analyses question whether reinforcement learning (RL) is responsible for strong reasoning in large language models (LLMs). At the same time, distillation and inference-time sampling, including power sampling, have emerged as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Akiyoshi Tomihari , Issei Sato

Recent years have seen significant advancements in foundation models through generative pre-training, yet algorithmic innovation in this space has largely stagnated around autoregressive models for discrete signals and diffusion models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Jiaming Song , Linqi Zhou

Increasing test-time computation is a straightforward approach to enhancing the quality of responses in Large Language Models (LLMs). While Best-of-N sampling and Self-Consistency with majority voting are simple and effective, they require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Chengsong Huang , Langlin Huang , Jixuan Leng , Jiacheng Liu , Jiaxin Huang

Test-time scaling improves large language models' (LLMs) performance by allocating more compute budget during inference. To achieve this, existing methods often require intricate modifications to prompting and sampling strategies. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Junqi Jiang , Tom Bewley , Salim I. Amoukou , Francesco Leofante , Antonio Rago , Saumitra Mishra , Francesca Toni

Self-consistency improves reasoning by aggregating diverse stochastic samples, yet the dynamics behind its efficacy remain underexplored. We reframe self-consistency as a dynamic distributional alignment problem, revealing that decoding…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Yiwei Li , Ji Zhang , Shaoxiong Feng , Peiwen Yuan , Xinglin Wang , Jiayi Shi , Yueqi Zhang , Chuyi Tan , Boyuan Pan , Yao Hu , Kan Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an impressive capability to perform reasoning tasks, especially if they are encouraged to generate a sequence of intermediate steps. Reasoning performance can be improved by suitably combining…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Soumyasundar Pal , Didier Chételat , Yingxue Zhang , Mark Coates

Scaling test-time compute brings substantial performance gains for large language models (LLMs). By sampling multiple answers and heuristically aggregate their answers (e.g., either through majority voting or using verifiers to rank the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Jianing Qi , Xi Ye , Hao Tang , Zhigang Zhu , Eunsol Choi

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown remarkable performance on challenging questions, such as math and coding. However, to obtain a high quality solution, one may need to sample more than once. In principal, there are two sampling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Xiangming Gu , Soham De , Larisa Markeeva , Petar Veličković , Razvan Pascanu

Autoregressive language models are next-token predictors and have been criticized for only optimizing surface plausibility (i.e., local coherence) rather than maintaining correct latent-state representations (i.e., global coherence).…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xucong Hu , Jian-Qiao Zhu

Self-consistency (SC) is a popular technique for improving the reasoning accuracy of large language models by aggregating multiple sampled outputs, but it comes at a high computational cost due to extensive sampling. We introduce a hybrid…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Raman Saparkhan , Majd Hawasly , Md Rizwan Parvez , Mohammad Raza

This paper provides an elementary, self-contained analysis of diffusion-based sampling methods for generative modeling. In contrast to existing approaches that rely on continuous-time processes and then discretize, our treatment works…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-25 Galen Reeves , Henry D. Pfister

We consider the task of performing probabilistic inference with probabilistic logical models. Many algorithms for approximate inference with such models are based on sampling. From a logic programming perspective, sampling boils down to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Daan Fierens

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…

Generations from large language models (LLMs) can be improved by sampling and scoring multiple solutions to select a final answer. Current "sample and select" methods such as self-consistency (SC) rely on majority voting to score answers.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Han Wang , Archiki Prasad , Elias Stengel-Eskin , Mohit Bansal

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit strong linguistic abilities while remaining unreliable on multi-step reasoning tasks, particularly when deployed without additional training or fine-tuning. In this work, we study inference-time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Vinay Sharma , Manish Jain