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A Simple Model of Inference Scaling Laws

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arxiv 2410.16377 v2 pith:ULWKA73P submitted 2024-10-21 stat.ML cs.AIcs.ITcs.LGmath.IT

classification stat.MLcs.AIcs.ITcs.LGmath.IT
keywords inferencescalinglawssimplecoveragemodelattemptsperformance
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Neural scaling laws have garnered significant interest due to their ability to predict model performance as a function of increasing parameters, data, and compute. In this work, we propose a simple statistical ansatz based on memorization to study scaling laws in the context of inference, specifically how performance improves with multiple inference attempts. We explore the coverage, or pass@k metric, which measures the chance of success over repeated attempts and provide a motivation for the observed functional form of the inference scaling behavior of the coverage in large language models (LLMs) on reasoning tasks. We then define an "inference loss", which exhibits a power law decay as the number of trials increases, and connect this result with prompting costs. We further test our construction by conducting experiments on a simple generative model, and find that our predictions are in agreement with the empirical coverage curves in a controlled setting. Our simple framework sets the ground for incorporating inference scaling with other known scaling laws.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Predictable Scale: Part II, Farseer: A Refined Scaling Law in Large Language Models

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A newly fitted scaling law with model-size-dependent data exponents predicts LLM loss more accurately than Chinchilla, including at a held-out 25.1B model.

  2. A Theory of Inference Compute Scaling: Reasoning through Directed Stochastic Skill Search

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A skill-graph random-walk model gives closed-form accuracy-versus-compute formulas for four reasoning strategies and connects them to training scaling.

  3. Revisiting Multi-Agent Debate as Test-Time Scaling: A Systematic Study of Conditional Effectiveness

    cs.AI 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A systematic benchmark shows multi-agent debate's value depends on task difficulty, model scale, and agent diversity: limited for math unless problems are hard or models weak, but useful for safety when agents are diverse.

  4. CyberV: Cybernetics for Test-time Scaling in Video Understanding

    cs.CV 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A training-free test-time feedback loop, using attention drift to select key frames, improves video MLLM accuracy, with the largest gains on knowledge-heavy VideoMMMU.

  5. X-Factor: Quality Is a Dataset-Intrinsic Property

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Across 2,500 class-balanced MNIST subsets and 10 model architectures, test-error Z-scores correlate strongly across models (mean R2=0.82 excluding GNB), supporting dataset quality as an intrinsic property.

  6. First Finish Search: Efficient Test-Time Scaling in Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-05 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    First Finish Search launches n parallel reasoning traces and returns the shortest one, improving accuracy on AIME benchmarks while cutting token use.

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