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.
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A Survey on Test-Time Scaling in Large Language Models: What, How, Where, and How Well?
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abstract
As enthusiasm for scaling computation (data and parameters) in the pretraining era gradually diminished, test-time scaling (TTS), also referred to as ``test-time computing'' has emerged as a prominent research focus. Recent studies demonstrate that TTS can further elicit the problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs), enabling significant breakthroughs not only in specialized reasoning tasks, such as mathematics and coding, but also in general tasks like open-ended Q&A. However, despite the explosion of recent efforts in this area, there remains an urgent need for a comprehensive survey offering a systemic understanding. To fill this gap, we propose a unified, multidimensional framework structured along four core dimensions of TTS research: what to scale, how to scale, where to scale, and how well to scale. Building upon this taxonomy, we conduct an extensive review of methods, application scenarios, and assessment aspects, and present an organized decomposition that highlights the unique functional roles of individual techniques within the broader TTS landscape. From this analysis, we distill the major developmental trajectories of TTS to date and offer hands-on guidelines for practical deployment. Furthermore, we identify several open challenges and offer insights into promising future directions, including further scaling, clarifying the functional essence of techniques, generalizing to more tasks, and more attributions. Our repository is available on https://github.com/testtimescaling/testtimescaling.github.io/
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representative citing papers
Clover fixes 96.8% of bugs on an RTL-repair benchmark using stochastic tree-of-thoughts and neural-symbolic agents, outperforming traditional and LLM baselines by 94% and 63% respectively with 87.5% pass@1.
AdverMCTS frames code generation as a minimax game where an attacker evolves tests to expose flaws in solver-generated code, yielding more robust outputs than static-test baselines.
DeepEyes uses reinforcement learning to teach vision-language models active perception and image-based thinking, yielding gains on perception, reasoning, grounding, and hallucination benchmarks.
MIGA introduces two-stage alignment to close train-inference gaps and dual consistency enhancement via self-reflection and long-range guidance to achieve SOTA temporal consistency in infinite-frame video generation on VBench and NarrLV.
BET reduces reasoning tokens by about 55% on average while improving performance across benchmarks by learning to short-solve easy queries, fold early on unsolvable ones, and preserve budget for hard solvable queries.
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.
HyperEyes presents a parallel multimodal search agent using dual-grained efficiency-aware RL with a new TRACE reward and IMEB benchmark, claiming 9.9% higher accuracy and 5.3x fewer tool calls than prior open-source agents.
Stream-T1 is a test-time scaling framework for streaming video generation using scaled noise propagation from history, reward pruning across short and long windows, and feedback-guided memory sinking to improve temporal consistency and visual quality.
VLA-ATTC equips VLA models with adaptive test-time compute via an uncertainty clutch and relative action critic, cutting failure rates by over 50% on LIBERO-LONG.
A disagreement-guided routing framework dynamically selects among resolution, voting, and rewriting strategies for test-time scaling, delivering 3-7% accuracy gains with lower sampling cost on mathematical benchmarks.
SimpleTES scales test-time evaluation in LLMs to discover state-of-the-art solutions on 21 scientific problems across six domains, outperforming frontier models and optimization pipelines with examples like 2x faster LASSO and new Erdos constructions.
ComPASS creates tool-augmented LLM agents for substantive social support, releases the first personalized benchmark ComPASS-Bench, and fine-tunes ComPASS-Qwen to outperform its base model while matching larger LLMs.
Hive is a multi-agent infrastructure with a logits cache for reducing cross-path redundancy in sampling and agent-aware scheduling for better compute and KV-cache allocation, shown to deliver 1.11x-1.76x speedups and 33%-51% lower hotspot miss rates.
A Lagrangian-relaxation plus imitation-learning pipeline adaptively allocates test-time compute to LLMs, outperforming uniform baselines by up to 12.8% relative accuracy on MATH while staying within a fixed average budget.
MARS² integrates multi-agent collaboration with tree-structured search in RL to boost code generation by increasing exploratory diversity and using path-level group advantages for credit assignment.
CODA uses rollout-based difficulty signals to drive two gates that penalize verbosity on easy instances and promote deliberation on hard ones, cutting token use over 60% on simple tasks while maintaining accuracy.
ETS performs training-free RL alignment for language models by energy-guided test-time scaling with Monte Carlo energy estimation and importance sampling acceleration.
RAPO++ is a three-stage prompt optimization framework combining retrieval-augmented refinement, closed-loop test-time scaling, and LLM fine-tuning to enhance text-to-video generation quality.
Post-training on reasoning tasks sparks the emergence of specialized attention heads that enable structured computation, with SFT adding stable heads while GRPO uses dynamic activation and pruning tied to reward signals, and controllable think models relying on compensatory heads instead of specific
GSR jointly trains LLMs to generate candidate solutions and refine a superior final answer from them, achieving state-of-the-art performance on five mathematical benchmarks while transferring across model scales.
ReasoningGuard is an inference-time method that uses attention mechanisms to inject safety aha moments and scaling sampling to defend large reasoning models against jailbreak attacks.
HSUGA improves LLM-enhanced sequential recommendation via staged hierarchical semantic understanding for better preference extraction and group-aware alignment that varies intensity by user activity level.
BitCal-TTS raises exact-match accuracy by 3.7 points (7B) and 2.8 points (14B) on small GSM8K shards for 4-bit Qwen2.5 models while cutting premature-stop rates and retaining token savings versus fixed-budget decoding.
citing papers explorer
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CA-SQL: Complexity-Aware Inference Time Reasoning for Text-to-SQL via Exploration and Compute Budget Allocation
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.
-
Clover: A Neural-Symbolic Agentic Harness with Stochastic Tree-of-Thoughts for Verified RTL Repair
Clover fixes 96.8% of bugs on an RTL-repair benchmark using stochastic tree-of-thoughts and neural-symbolic agents, outperforming traditional and LLM baselines by 94% and 63% respectively with 87.5% pass@1.
-
AdverMCTS: Combating Pseudo-Correctness in Code Generation via Adversarial Monte Carlo Tree Search
AdverMCTS frames code generation as a minimax game where an attacker evolves tests to expose flaws in solver-generated code, yielding more robust outputs than static-test baselines.
-
DeepEyes: Incentivizing "Thinking with Images" via Reinforcement Learning
DeepEyes uses reinforcement learning to teach vision-language models active perception and image-based thinking, yielding gains on perception, reasoning, grounding, and hallucination benchmarks.
-
Enhancing Train-Free Infinite-Frame Generation for Consistent Long Videos
MIGA introduces two-stage alignment to close train-inference gaps and dual consistency enhancement via self-reflection and long-range guidance to achieve SOTA temporal consistency in infinite-frame video generation on VBench and NarrLV.
-
Nice Fold or Hero Call: Learning Budget-Efficient Thinking for Adaptive Reasoning
BET reduces reasoning tokens by about 55% on average while improving performance across benchmarks by learning to short-solve easy queries, fold early on unsolvable ones, and preserve budget for hard solvable queries.
-
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.
-
HyperEyes: Dual-Grained Efficiency-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Parallel Multimodal Search Agents
HyperEyes presents a parallel multimodal search agent using dual-grained efficiency-aware RL with a new TRACE reward and IMEB benchmark, claiming 9.9% higher accuracy and 5.3x fewer tool calls than prior open-source agents.
-
Stream-T1: Test-Time Scaling for Streaming Video Generation
Stream-T1 is a test-time scaling framework for streaming video generation using scaled noise propagation from history, reward pruning across short and long windows, and feedback-guided memory sinking to improve temporal consistency and visual quality.
-
VLA-ATTC: Adaptive Test-Time Compute for VLA Models with Relative Action Critic Model
VLA-ATTC equips VLA models with adaptive test-time compute via an uncertainty clutch and relative action critic, cutting failure rates by over 50% on LIBERO-LONG.
-
When to Vote, When to Rewrite: Disagreement-Guided Strategy Routing for Test-Time Scaling
A disagreement-guided routing framework dynamically selects among resolution, voting, and rewriting strategies for test-time scaling, delivering 3-7% accuracy gains with lower sampling cost on mathematical benchmarks.
-
Evaluation-driven Scaling for Scientific Discovery
SimpleTES scales test-time evaluation in LLMs to discover state-of-the-art solutions on 21 scientific problems across six domains, outperforming frontier models and optimization pipelines with examples like 2x faster LASSO and new Erdos constructions.
-
ComPASS: Towards Personalized Agentic Social Support via Tool-Augmented Companionship
ComPASS creates tool-augmented LLM agents for substantive social support, releases the first personalized benchmark ComPASS-Bench, and fine-tunes ComPASS-Qwen to outperform its base model while matching larger LLMs.
-
Hive: A Multi-Agent Infrastructure for Algorithm- and Task-Level Scaling
Hive is a multi-agent infrastructure with a logits cache for reducing cross-path redundancy in sampling and agent-aware scheduling for better compute and KV-cache allocation, shown to deliver 1.11x-1.76x speedups and 33%-51% lower hotspot miss rates.
-
Adaptive Test-Time Compute Allocation for Reasoning LLMs via Constrained Policy Optimization
A Lagrangian-relaxation plus imitation-learning pipeline adaptively allocates test-time compute to LLMs, outperforming uniform baselines by up to 12.8% relative accuracy on MATH while staying within a fixed average budget.
-
MARS$^2$: Scaling Multi-Agent Tree Search via Reinforcement Learning for Code Generation
MARS² integrates multi-agent collaboration with tree-structured search in RL to boost code generation by increasing exploratory diversity and using path-level group advantages for credit assignment.
-
CODA: Difficulty-Aware Compute Allocation for Adaptive Reasoning
CODA uses rollout-based difficulty signals to drive two gates that penalize verbosity on easy instances and promote deliberation on hard ones, cutting token use over 60% on simple tasks while maintaining accuracy.
-
ETS: Energy-Guided Test-Time Scaling for Training-Free RL Alignment
ETS performs training-free RL alignment for language models by energy-guided test-time scaling with Monte Carlo energy estimation and importance sampling acceleration.
-
RAPO++: Cross-Stage Prompt Optimization for Text-to-Video Generation via Data Alignment and Test-Time Scaling
RAPO++ is a three-stage prompt optimization framework combining retrieval-augmented refinement, closed-loop test-time scaling, and LLM fine-tuning to enhance text-to-video generation quality.
-
Thinking Sparks!: Emergent Attention Heads in Reasoning Models During Post Training
Post-training on reasoning tasks sparks the emergence of specialized attention heads that enable structured computation, with SFT adding stable heads while GRPO uses dynamic activation and pruning tied to reward signals, and controllable think models relying on compensatory heads instead of specific
-
Learning to Refine: Self-Refinement of Parallel Reasoning in LLMs
GSR jointly trains LLMs to generate candidate solutions and refine a superior final answer from them, achieving state-of-the-art performance on five mathematical benchmarks while transferring across model scales.
-
ReasoningGuard: Safeguarding Large Reasoning Models with Inference-time Safety Aha Moments
ReasoningGuard is an inference-time method that uses attention mechanisms to inject safety aha moments and scaling sampling to defend large reasoning models against jailbreak attacks.
-
HSUGA: LLM-Enhanced Recommendation with Hierarchical Semantic Understanding and Group-Aware Alignment
HSUGA improves LLM-enhanced sequential recommendation via staged hierarchical semantic understanding for better preference extraction and group-aware alignment that varies intensity by user activity level.
-
BitCal-TTS: Bit-Calibrated Test-Time Scaling for Quantized Reasoning Models
BitCal-TTS raises exact-match accuracy by 3.7 points (7B) and 2.8 points (14B) on small GSM8K shards for 4-bit Qwen2.5 models while cutting premature-stop rates and retaining token savings versus fixed-budget decoding.
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Training-Free Test-Time Contrastive Learning for Large Language Models
TF-TTCL lets frozen LLMs adapt online by distilling textual rules from contrastive reasoning trajectories generated via multi-agent augmentation and applying them through retrieval-based steering.
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Test-time Scaling over Perception: Resolving the Grounding Paradox in Thinking with Images
TTSP resolves the Grounding Paradox by treating perception as a scalable test-time process that generates, filters, and iteratively refines multiple visual exploration traces, outperforming baselines on high-resolution and multimodal reasoning tasks.
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From Exposure to Internalization: Dual-Stream Calibration for In-context Clinical Reasoning
Dual-Stream Calibration uses entropy minimization and iterative meta-learning at test time to internalize clinical evidence and outperform standard in-context learning baselines on medical tasks.
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Pruning Long Chain-of-Thought of Large Reasoning Models via Small-Scale Preference Optimization
LCPO reduces average LRM output length by over 50% across benchmarks via targeted preference optimization while preserving reasoning performance.
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The Agent Use of Agent Beings: Agent Cybernetics Is the Missing Science of Foundation Agents
Agent Cybernetics reframes foundation agent design by adapting classical cybernetics laws into three engineering desiderata for reliable, long-running, self-improving agents.
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A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligence
The paper delivers the first systematic review of self-evolving agents, structured around what components evolve, when adaptation occurs, and how it is implemented.
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