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.
super hub Canonical reference
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.
220
Pith papers citing it
Background
85% of classified citations
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 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.
hub tools
citation-role summary
background 48
dataset 3
method 3
citation-polarity summary
claims ledger
- 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
authors
co-cited works
representative citing papers
Test-time training with KV binding reduces to learned linear attention.
Physics-IQ benchmark reveals that generative video models exhibit limited physical understanding unrelated to their visual quality.
MedPRMBench is the first fine-grained benchmark for process reward models in medical reasoning, featuring 6500 questions, 13000 chains, 113910 step labels, and a baseline that improves downstream QA accuracy by 3.2-6.7 points.
Co-ReAct adds step-level rubric guidance to ReAct agents via a GRPO-trained generator using list-wise ranking rewards, yielding consistent gains on DeepResearchBench and SQA-CS-V2.
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.
Anchored Tree Sampling converts horizon-compounding drift into anchor-bounded drift by organizing video generation as a sparse-to-dense tree of imputations instead of left-to-right autoregressive rollout.
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.
CAPS is a four-stage inference-only cascade that adapts how much of each solution the verifier sees and how comparisons are distributed, halving per-candidate verifier tokens while outperforming uniform pairwise verification on most benchmarks.
Minerva-Ego is a new benchmark for egocentric visual reasoning with dense human-annotated traces and masks, showing that spatiotemporal hints substantially improve frontier model performance.
A survey that unifies prior work on multi-agent LLM systems via the LIFE framework, mapping dependencies across collaboration, failure attribution, and autonomous self-evolution while identifying cross-stage challenges.
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.
QueST adapts LLMs at test time by generating query-specific problem-solution pairs for self-supervised fine-tuning, improving reasoning performance without external data.
VeGAS improves MLLM-based embodied agents by sampling action ensembles and using a verifier trained on LLM-synthesized failure cases, yielding up to 36% relative gains on hard multi-object long-horizon tasks in Habitat and ALFRED.
StepCodeReasoner aligns code reasoning with verifiable stepwise execution traces via print anchors and bi-level GRPO reinforcement learning, reaching SOTA results on CRUXEval (91.1%) and LiveCodeBench (86.5%) for a 7B model.
Presents a likelihood-based benchmark for equation-suffix prediction in technical papers with controls to detect shortcut vulnerabilities in model forecasts.
V-ABS is an action-observer beam search method with entropy-based adaptive weighting and an 80k-sample SFT dataset that delivers 19.7% average gains on visual reasoning tasks for MLLMs.
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.
RubricRefine is a training-free pre-execution method that creates rubrics to score and fix inter-tool contract violations in agent code, reaching 0.86 average on M3ToolEval across seven models with zero executions and lower latency.
BubbleSpec exploits long-tail bubbles in synchronous RL by using faster ranks' idle time to pre-generate rollout drafts for speculative decoding, reducing steps by 50% and raising throughput up to 1.8x while preserving exact synchrony.
CollabVR improves video reasoning performance by coupling vision-language models and video generation models in a closed-loop step-level collaboration that detects and repairs generation failures.
DUET improves RLVR by allocating tokens across both prompt selection and rollout length, outperforming full-budget baselines even when using only half the tokens.
CA-SQL achieves 51.72% execution accuracy on the challenging tier of the BIRD benchmark using GPT-4o-mini by scaling exploration breadth according to estimated task difficulty, evolutionary prompt seeding, and candidate voting.
POPO uses bounded importance sampling on positive rollouts and a siamese policy network to achieve implicit negative gradients and stable optimization, matching or exceeding GRPO on math benchmarks such as 36.67% on AIME 2025.
citing papers explorer
-
Forge: Quality-Aware Reinforcement Learning for NP-Hard Optimization in LLMs
OPT-BENCH trains LLMs on NP-hard optimization via quality-aware RLVR, achieving 93.1% success rate and 46.6% quality ratio on Qwen2.5-7B while outperforming GPT-4o and transferring gains to other domains.
-
SFT Memorizes, RL Generalizes: A Comparative Study of Foundation Model Post-training
Reinforcement learning post-training enables generalization to unseen textual rule variants and visual changes in foundation models, while supervised fine-tuning primarily leads to memorization.
-
Learning to Explore: Scaling Agentic Reasoning via Exploration-Aware Policy Optimization
An exploration-aware policy optimization method lets LLM agents explore selectively via a variational-inference reward and action grouping, yielding consistent gains on text and GUI agent benchmarks.