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Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters

Canonical reference. 85% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.

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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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LLMs Improving LLMs: Agentic Discovery for Test-Time Scaling

cs.CL · 2026-05-08 · conditional · novelty 8.0 · 2 refs

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 tasks at low cost.

Learning How to Cube

cs.LG · 2026-05-15 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

A neuro-symbolic post-training pipeline lets a 4B transformer learn cubing heuristics that reach pass@5 of 53 on 100 SAT competition instances, matching the strongest symbolic baseline.

Test-Time Learning with an Evolving Library

cs.LG · 2026-05-14 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

EvoLib enables LLMs to accumulate, reuse, and evolve knowledge abstractions from inference trajectories at test time, yielding substantial gains on math reasoning, code generation, and agentic benchmarks without parameter updates or supervision.

Active Testing of Large Language Models via Approximate Neyman Allocation

cs.AI · 2026-05-11 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0 · 2 refs

Proposes surrogate semantic entropy stratification followed by approximate Neyman allocation for active testing of LLMs on generative benchmarks, reporting up to 28% MSE reduction and 22.9% average budget savings versus uniform sampling.

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  • HIDBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Host-Based Intrusion Detection cs.CR · 2026-05-20 · unverdicted · none · ref 28 · internal anchor

    HIDBench unifies DARPA-E3, DARPA-E5, and NodLink datasets with a data pipeline to benchmark LLMs for host-based intrusion detection, showing high precision on simple logs but sharp drops in MCC and rises in false positives on complex noisy data.