arXiv:2606. 28661v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: People overthink; language models over-sample, and the extra effort can talk both into a worse answer.
arXiv:2607. 28576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Methods that make a language model plan, criticise and rewrite its own answer, reflect on mistakes, pick the best of several attempts, or debate with copies of itself nearly all make it generate far more text than a single chain of thought.
arXiv:2606. 02835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve performance by generating explicit intermediate reasoning traces through increased test-time compute, yet the assumption that longer reasoning is consistently beneficial remains under-examined.
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.
The paper studies how voting over multiple large language model (LLM) responses can be optimized under a fixed call budget. It introduces a recoverability threshold that quantifies the gap between discovering a correct answer and ensuring it wins the plurality vote, showing that the candidate set can only grow while the set of reachable winners can only shrink. The authors also present a gold‑free locking certificate that identifies the earliest prefix where all remaining continuations produce the same fixed‑budget output, and demonstrate empirical gains in accuracy and call efficiency through input permutation and exact locking.
arXiv:2607. 14552v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A standard recipe for distilling the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) is to sample chains of thought from the model, keep those that reach the correct final answer, and fine-tune on the survivors.
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.
arXiv:2608. 03401v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models often reason at length before answering, increasing cost and latency.
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.
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.
The paper introduces Planned Test-Time Scaling (PTTS), a method that replaces independent sampling of reasoning branches with a coordinated joint policy. PTTS uses a planner to generate distinct solution outlines for each branch and an executor to produce full solutions, thereby improving coverage of complementary reasoning modes. Two variants—PTTS‑ZS (zero‑shot) and PTTS‑RL (reinforcement‑learned)—demonstrate significant gains on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks, with PTTS‑RL achieving up to a 13.4‑point improvement in pass@64 over repeated sampling.
arXiv:2608. 07931v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) are prone to hallucination, which undermines their reliability and poses challenges for safe deployment.
arXiv:2607. 11598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: There are two standard ways to spend more compute at test time: let a model reason longer, or sample more attempts and keep one.