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:2606. 30852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning models spend different amounts of useful computation across instances, but it remains unclear when a learned stopping rule improves over simple confidence or convergence thresholds.
By Zhe Dong (University of Maine at Presque Isle), Fang Qin (Stanford University), Manish Shah (Independent Researcher)
The paper introduces the concept of persistent calibration, which requires a confidence estimator to accurately reflect a model’s evolving knowledge without additional supervision. It evaluates this by comparing confidence estimators trained on earlier checkpoints to their performance on later checkpoints using knowledge contrast sets—questions that shift from correct to incorrect answers across checkpoints. The study finds that standard inference-time and fine-tuning methods underperform compared to oracle methods, and suggests that multi-checkpoint training can improve calibration by identifying robust confidence features.
By Victor Wang, Thomas Hofweber, Mohit Bansal, Elias Stengel-Eskin
arXiv:2607. 22602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inference-time scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving large language model reasoning, often delivering larger gains on difficult reasoning tasks than parameter scaling alone.
By Tingxin Yang, Zefeng Wang, Mengyue Wang, Xingcheng Zhou, Yunpu Ma
TRACES (Tagging Reasoning Steps for Adaptive Cost‑Efficient Early‑Stopping) is a lightweight framework that tags reasoning steps of large‑language models in real time, enabling adaptive, cost‑efficient early stopping during inference. By monitoring the types of steps generated, the method identifies when models shift their reasoning after arriving at a correct answer, allowing for interpretable stopping criteria. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks (MATH500, GSM8K, AIME) and knowledge benchmarks (MMLU, GPQA) show token reductions of 20–50% while preserving accuracy, with more conservative thresholds needed for harder tasks such as BeyondAIME and IMO AnswerBench.
By Yannis Belkhiter, Seshu Tirupathi, Giulio Zizzo, John D. Kelleher
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
arXiv:2604. 04930v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large reasoning models rely on long chain-of-thought generation to solve complex problems, but extended reasoning often incurs substantial computational cost and can even degrade performance due to overthinking.
By Parsa Hosseini, Sumit Nawathe, Mahdi Salmani, Meisam Razaviyayn, Soheil Feizi
arXiv:2604. 23270v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a simple and effective way to elicit step-by-step solutions from large language models (LLMs).
By Shuxu Chen, Yitian Zhou, Jiaquan Zhang, Haoyu Bian, Wenrui Hu, Aming Wu, Sungyoung Lee, Chaoning Zhang, Hyundong Shin
arXiv:2608. 15065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models produce diverse, sometimes inconsistent answers across repeated queries on the same problem, so multi-sample inference is a prerequisite for reliable deployment.
By Chanhee Park, Sungbin Han, Jeongho Yoon, Seongtae Hong, Heuiseok Lim
arXiv:2602. 14307v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly saturate new benchmarks shortly after they are published, benchmarking itself is at a juncture: if frontier models keep improving, it will become increasingly hard for humans to generate discriminative tasks, provide accurate ground-truth answers, or evaluate complex solutions.
By Samuele Marro, Jialin Yu, Emanuele La Malfa, Oishi Deb, Jiawei Li, Yibo Yang, Ebey Abraham, Sunando Sengupta, Eric Sommerlade, Michael Wooldridge, Philip Torr
arXiv:2607. 18100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extended reasoning has become standard for frontier Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the trajectories these models produce remain largely uncontrollable.
By Sheldon Yu, Tong Yu, Xunyi Jiang, Rohan Surana, Gagan Mundada, Sungchul Kim, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu
arXiv:2605. 25143v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Test-time scaling improves language model reasoning by spending additional compute to explore multiple solution trajectories.
By Dao Tran, Duc Anh Le, Ngoc Luu, Quan Pham, Tung Pham, Hung Bui