The paper introduces the concept of proof‑carrying cognition, aiming to close the verification gap in language‑model reasoning by using reality‑settled rewards. It presents a theoretical framework linking verifier‑gold correlation to compute‑capability trade‑offs, demonstrates that unsound verifiers degrade under best‑of‑N selection while sound verifiers improve, and proposes a new benchmark metric, Soundness‑under‑Pressure, for evaluating reality‑settled reasoning systems.
By Eshwar Reddy M, Sourav Karmakar
arXiv:2609.38672v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Beam-search-based test-time methods provide an effective way to improve large language model (LLM) performance on long-horizon generation by pruning...
By Qijia He, Yu Huang, Yuan Cheng, Yuxin Chen, Yingbin Liang
The paper introduces Budget‑Efficient Thinking (BET), a two‑stage framework that treats adaptive reasoning as a computational investment, aligning solve‑or‑fold decisions with expected return rather than perceived difficulty. BET learns three distinct behaviors: concise short solves for easy queries, early abstention (nice fold) when further reasoning is unlikely to pay off, and allocating sufficient compute (hero call) for hard‑but‑solvable questions. Experiments on seven benchmarks with three base models show BET cuts reasoning tokens by 54% while boosting accuracy by up to 3.2%, and it transfers effectively to scientific QA and logical reasoning tasks.
By Zhaomeng Zhou, Lan Zhang, Junyang Wang, Mu Yuan, Songlin Liu, Tingzhao Li, Yiqing Hu, Yumeng Zhao
arXiv:2510. 00492v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The reliability of large language models (LLMs) during test-time scaling is often assessed with \emph{external verifiers} or \emph{reward models} that distinguish correct reasoning from flawed logic.
By Dong Bok Lee, Seanie Lee, Sangwoo Park, Minki Kang, Jinheon Baek, Dongki Kim, Dominik Wagner, Jiongdao Jin, Heejun Lee, Tobias Bocklet, Jinyu Wang, Jingjing Fu, Sung Ju Hwang, Jiang Bian, Lei Song
The paper investigates how test‑time computation can enhance language models and at what cost, introducing the SELF‑POT benchmark to evaluate this across competition mathematics, competitive programming, and agentic workflows. SELF‑POT separates candidate coverage from final accuracy, tracks correctness transitions under revision, and measures protocol completion alongside task success. Using a unified budget rule, the study compares direct inference, parallel sampling, and self‑revision across five low‑cost reasoning models, revealing that selection rules and failure handling significantly influence gains and cost savings.
By Bangji Yang, Jingyuan Li, Jiajun Fan, Yi Evie Zhang, Ruihan Guo, Hongba Ma, Neil He, Chumeng Liang, Qinglong Zheng, Zhanghan Ni, Ge Liu
arXiv:2608. 20256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning language models trained with reinforcement learning typically operate under a fixed token budget rather than an explicitly adaptive one, which can lead to over-computation on easy problems and insufficient computation on difficult ones.
By Gijs Kassenaar, Zhao Yang, Vincent Fran\c{c}ois-Lavet
arXiv:2608. 05643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling improves LLM reasoning by using additional inference compute, but wider sampling alone can suffer from diminishing returns: new rollouts often repeat existing answer patterns instead of adding useful reasoning diversity.
By Ahsan Bilal, Muhammad Ahmed Mohsin, Muhammad Umer, Lena Trigg, Ali Subhan, Muhammad Ali, Dean F. Hougen
arXiv:2608. 15445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a reward is correct on every training example yet consistent with more than one goal, a model can acquire an unintended one, a failure known as goal misgeneralization.
By Suyash Maniyar, Armaan Sandhu, Abhishek Mishra
arXiv:2607. 10139v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Selecting the correct answer from a pool of candidate reasoning chains is the engine of test-time scaling, yet the standard selectors each carry a cost: self-consistency inherits the errors of the single model it resamples, and trained reward models need labeled data and transfer poorly off-distribution.
By Ning Liu
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:2609.38409v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent progress in large language model reasoning has been driven by benchmarks and reinforcement learning environments with automatically verifiable r...
By \.Ibrahim Ethem Deveci, Funda Tan \c{C}al{\i}k, Bar{\i}\c{s} Deniz Sa\u{g}lam, Duygu Ataman
arXiv:2605. 17609v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many inference-time language-model pipelines combine a cheap reward signal with an expensive verifier, such as exact answer checking in mathematical reasoning or hidden-test execution in code generation.
By Shaddin Dughmi, Mahdi Haghifam, Yusuf Hakan Kalayci