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Efficient Test-Time Scaling via Self-Calibration

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arxiv 2503.00031 v1 pith:I7WRJX3T submitted 2025-02-25 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL

Efficient Test-Time Scaling via Self-Calibration

classification cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL
keywords confidenceresponsestest-timebest-of-nconfidence-basedllmssamplingscaling
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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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 a fixed number of sampling responses for each query, regardless of its complexity. This could result in wasted computation for simpler questions and insufficient exploration for more challenging ones. In this work, we argue that model confidence of responses can be used for improving the efficiency of test-time scaling. Unfortunately, LLMs are known to be overconfident and provide unreliable confidence estimation. To address this limitation, we introduce Self-Calibration by distilling Self-Consistency-derived confidence into the model itself. This enables reliable confidence estimation at test time with one forward pass. We then design confidence-based efficient test-time scaling methods to handle queries of various difficulty, such as Early-Stopping for Best-of-N and Self-Consistency with calibrated confidence. Experiments on three LLMs across six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Specifically, applying confidence-based Early Stopping to Best-of-N improves MathQA accuracy from 81.0 to 83.6 with a sample budget of 16 responses, indicating the efficacy of confidence-based sampling strategy at inference time.

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Forward citations

Cited by 13 Pith papers

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

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    AutoTTS discovers width-depth test-time scaling controllers through agentic search in a pre-collected trajectory environment, yielding better accuracy-cost tradeoffs than hand-designed baselines on math reasoning task...

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  4. Post Reasoning: Improving the Performance of Non-Thinking Models at No Cost

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  8. Distilling Long-CoT Reasoning through Collaborative Step-wise Multi-Teacher Decoding

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  10. Process Supervision of Confidence Margin for Calibrated LLM Reasoning

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RLCM trains LLMs with a margin-enhanced process reward that widens the gap between correct and incorrect reasoning steps, improving calibration on math, code, logic, and science tasks without hurting accuracy.

  11. GrACE: A Generative Approach to Better Confidence Elicitation and Efficient Test-Time Scaling in Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0

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  12. Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models

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    A survey organizing techniques to achieve efficient reasoning in LLMs by shortening chain-of-thought outputs.

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    cs.AI 2025-03 unverdicted novelty 5.0

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