arXiv AI

Test-Time Scaling in the Wild: Why Exploitation, Not Exploration, Is the Bottleneck

The paper examines test‑time scaling (TTS) methods that use extra inference compute to improve language model outputs. Across five open‑ended benchmarks—medicine, law, finance, general chat, and creative writing—the study finds that increasing exploration (generating more candidates) consistently yields better top candidates, but exploitation (selecting the final output) remains weak due to poor reward‑model correlation. Only the Fusion approach, which synthesizes candidates, reliably improves results, yet it recovers only about 40% of the potential quality, indicating that the bottleneck lies in choosing from the candidate pool rather than generating it.

arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

When Agents Slow Down: Understanding LLM Agents' Test-Time Strategies via Elo-per-token Analysis

arXiv:2609.15309v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents allocate test-time compute adaptively as they revise solutions, use tools, explore alternatives, and decide when to s...

By Kaiyuan Liu, Qiuyang Mang, Bo Peng, Wenhao Chai, Hanchen Li, Shreyas Pimpalgaonkar, Luke Zettlemoyer, Alex Dimakis, Alvin Cheung
arXiv AI
Jul 16

Representation-Based Exploration for Language Models: From Test-Time to Post-Training

arXiv:2510. 11686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to expand the capabilities of language models, but it is unclear if current RL techniques promote the discovery of novel behaviors, or simply sharpen those already present in the base model.

By Jens Tuyls, Dylan J. Foster, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Jordan T. Ash
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

ATLAS: Agentic Test-time Learning-to-Allocate Scaling

arXiv:2606. 01667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling has become a major way to improve large language model reasoning, but its orchestration has remained designer-engineered: a fixed sample budget, a fixed refinement loop, a fixed scoring rule, or a fixed search policy decides how compute is spent, leaving the model in charge of solving but not of orchestration.

By Peijia Qin, Qi Cao, Pengtao Xie
arXiv AI
Jul 29

DecoEvo: Score-Decoupled Co-Evolution of Solver and Rubric-Generator Skills in Text Space

arXiv:2607. 25675v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-space optimization adapts large language models (LLMs) by editing external natural-language artifacts rather than model weights, so the optimized artifacts remain inspectable and the model can be treated as a black box.

By Jiangwang Chen, Zixin Song, Junlin Liu, Shuaiyu Zhou, Haiyan Wu, Haihan Shi, Chenxi Zhou, Hanqing Li, Xiao Yang, Da Zhu, Guanjun Jiang, Hai Wan, Xibin Zhao
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 1

ATLAS: Agentic Test-time Learning-to-Allocate Scaling

Test-time scaling has become a major way to improve large language model reasoning, but its orchestration has remained designer-engineered: a fixed sample budget, a fixed refinement loop, a fixed scoring rule, or a fixed search policy decides how compute is spent, leaving the model in charge of solving but not of orchestration. We introduce ATLAS, an agentic test-time scaling framework in which an LLM orchestrator owns the control loop end-to-end.