EGLR adds a deterministic layer-recursion axis gated by entropy that is complementary to temperature sampling, raising joint oracle accuracy on MATH-500 from 83.4% to 91.6% for a 3B model.
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Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters
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Enabling LLMs to improve their outputs by using more test-time computation is a critical step towards building generally self-improving agents that can operate on open-ended natural language. In this paper, we study the scaling of inference-time computation in LLMs, with a focus on answering the question: if an LLM is allowed to use a fixed but non-trivial amount of inference-time compute, how much can it improve its performance on a challenging prompt? Answering this question has implications not only on the achievable performance of LLMs, but also on the future of LLM pretraining and how one should tradeoff inference-time and pre-training compute. Despite its importance, little research attempted to understand the scaling behaviors of various test-time inference methods. Moreover, current work largely provides negative results for a number of these strategies. In this work, we analyze two primary mechanisms to scale test-time computation: (1) searching against dense, process-based verifier reward models; and (2) updating the model's distribution over a response adaptively, given the prompt at test time. We find that in both cases, the effectiveness of different approaches to scaling test-time compute critically varies depending on the difficulty of the prompt. This observation motivates applying a "compute-optimal" scaling strategy, which acts to most effectively allocate test-time compute adaptively per prompt. Using this compute-optimal strategy, we can improve the efficiency of test-time compute scaling by more than 4x compared to a best-of-N baseline. Additionally, in a FLOPs-matched evaluation, we find that on problems where a smaller base model attains somewhat non-trivial success rates, test-time compute can be used to outperform a 14x larger model.
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- abstract Enabling LLMs to improve their outputs by using more test-time computation is a critical step towards building generally self-improving agents that can operate on open-ended natural language. In this paper, we study the scaling of inference-time computation in LLMs, with a focus on answering the question: if an LLM is allowed to use a fixed but non-trivial amount of inference-time compute, how much can it improve its performance on a challenging prompt? Answering this question has implications not only on the achievable performance of LLMs, but also on the future of LLM pretraining and how one
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Test-time training with KV binding reduces to learned linear attention.
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Preregistered placebo-controlled decomposition shows external executable counterexamples drive self-repair gains in small code models more than re-exposure or self-critique.
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KCSAT-ML benchmark supplies human error rates for math problems and DRG metric exposes that model accuracy collapses on high-human-error items while test-time scaling shows non-monotonic gains and alignment failures.
PRISM is a contrastive, policy-aware training framework for process reward models that reduces false positives by 22% on PRMBench and boosts downstream accuracy up to 33% in Best-of-N selection by learning reliable relative comparisons instead of pointwise labels.
Three problem-level trajectory features derived from the distributional signature of failed LLM rollouts enable failure clustering at 84.3% accuracy and a training-free routing rule that improves rescue by 12.2% on hard cases.
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LLMs achieve up to 78.8% accuracy and r=0.590 correlation mimicking individual SOEP respondents using cumulative microdata, with gains from more information but diminishing returns past the 75% entropy point.
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LaneRoPE adds an inter-sequence attention mask and extended RoPE to enable collaborative parallel sequence generation in LLMs, yielding accuracy gains on math reasoning under length limits.
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