The paper introduces Adaptive Self-Consistency (ASC), a method that treats large language models as grey-boxes by leveraging the full answer distribution from log‑probabilities rather than single sampled answers. It formulates inference as sequential mode identification with distribution‑valued observations, proving that this approach never performs worse than traditional black‑box sampling and can stop earlier. The proposed ASC‑D algorithm, a betting‑based stopping rule, achieves significant reductions in required trajectories—up to 95.6% fewer—while attaining the best fixed‑budget correct‑certification rates on MMLU‑Redux across three open‑source models.
By Jingkai Huang, Yunfan Zhang, Will Ma, Weihua Zhou, Zhengyuan Zhou
arXiv:2602. 05395v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A simple strategy for improving LLM accuracy, especially in math and reasoning problems, is to sample multiple responses and submit the answer most consistently reached.
By Jingkai Huang, Will Ma, Zhengyuan Zhou
arXiv:2606. 17832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often hypothesized to perform implicit Bayesian inference, yet a key coherence condition, the martingale property of predictive beliefs, has been shown to fail in controlled synthetic in-context learning settings.
By SongEun Kim, Seungyoo Lee, Edwin Fong, Hyungi Lee, Juho Lee
Flow Reasoning Models (FRMs) are a new framework that turns continuous flow models into efficient recurrent reasoners for structured tasks. By self‑conditioning a flow model on its own past outputs, FRMs iteratively refine solutions, allowing parallel decision making and revision. The authors introduce Fixed‑Point Forcing (FPF) to mitigate exposure bias at deeper recursion, and report near‑perfect solve rates on Sudoku‑Extreme, Zebra, and Maze‑Unique, outperforming existing masked‑diffusion and specialized baselines while using far fewer inference FLOPs.
By Alec Helbling, Andrey Bryutkin, Mauro Martino, Duen Horng Chau, Nima Dehmamy, Hendrik Strobelt
arXiv:2606.16011v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Standard accuracy benchmarks evaluate whether large language models (LLMs) reach correct answers. However, they do not test whether models maintain...
By Nafiseh Nikeghbal, Amir Hossein Kargaran, Shaghayegh Kolli, Jana Diesner
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for language models are typically evaluated on single-turn outputs, where uncertainty is attached to one generated answer. For LLM agents, however, the unit of observation is an interactive trajectory, where the model can ask clarifying questions, call tools, update state, and make intermediate decisions whose errors propagate to the final outcome.
Parallel test-time scaling samples many reasoning traces and majority-votes their answers, improving LLM accuracy but requiring traces to run to completion, incurring substantial computational overhead. We observe that probing partial traces at intermediate checkpoints can extract current answers without disrupting generation, revealing an evolving aggregate vote.
arXiv:2608. 09217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training paradigm for eliciting reasoning capabilities in large language models, yet uniform task sampling allocates compute without regard to differences in how tasks respond to optimization.
By Ting Zhou, Zhenqing Ling, Daoyuan Chen, Qianli Shen, Yilun Huang, Ying Shen, Yaliang Li
arXiv:2606. 12935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parallel test-time scaling samples many reasoning traces and majority-votes their answers, improving LLM accuracy but requiring traces to run to completion, incurring substantial computational overhead.
By Wenbo Chen, Puheng Li, Mengyang Liu, Weijie Su, Tianpei Xie
Selective Regenerative Decoding (SRD) is a new inference-time decoding method that improves large language model reasoning by allowing segment-level intervention on candidate trajectories. Instead of discarding or keeping entire trajectories, SRD selectively refines only the degraded suffix while preserving useful prefixes, leading to higher expected trajectory quality and better sample efficiency. Experiments on MATH500, GPQA Diamond, HotpotQA, and AlpacaEval show that SRD matches Best-of-N accuracy with fewer generated tokens and outperforms speculative rejection in low‑compute settings.
By Sophia Xiao Pu, Yumo Xu, Sailik Sengupta, Millennium Bismay, Ruixue Lian, James Gung, Yi-an Lai, Arshit Gupta
arXiv:2608. 11552v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for language models are typically evaluated on single-turn outputs, where uncertainty is attached to one generated answer.
By Dylan Bouchard, Mohit Singh Chauhan
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training paradigm for eliciting reasoning capabilities in large language models, yet uniform task sampling allocates compute without regard to differences in how tasks respond to optimization. Existing task-valuation methods mostly rely on snapshot-based signals such as current pass rate or reward, which estimate how solvable a task is under the current policy.