arXiv AI

Optimal Bayesian Stopping for Efficient Inference of Consistent LLM Answers

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.

arXiv AI
Jul 23

Statistical Early Stopping for Reasoning Models

arXiv:2602. 13935v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While LLMs have seen substantial improvement in reasoning capabilities, they also sometimes overthink, generating unnecessary reasoning steps, particularly under uncertainty, given ill-posed or ambiguous queries.

By Yangxinyu Xie, Tao Wang, Soham Mallick, Yan Sun, Georgy Noarov, Mengxin Yu, Tanwi Mallick, Weijie J. Su, Edgar Dobriban
arXiv AI
3d ago

Adaptive Self-Consistency: From Black-Box Sampling to Distribution-Valued Feedback

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 AI
Jun 15

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

arXiv:2505. 12992v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining.

By Baohao Liao, Hanze Dong, Yuhui Xu, Doyen Sahoo, Christof Monz, Junnan Li, Caiming Xiong
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

TRACES: Tagging Reasoning Steps for Adaptive Cost-Efficient Early-Stopping

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 AI
Jul 21

Evaluating LLMs When They Do Not Know the Answer: Statistical Evaluation of Mathematical Reasoning via Comparative Signals

arXiv:2602. 03061v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating mathematical reasoning in LLMs is constrained by limited benchmark sizes and inherent model stochasticity, yielding high-variance accuracy estimates and unstable rankings across platforms.

By Zihan Dong, Zhixian Zhang, Yang Zhou, Can Jin, Ruijia Wu, Linjun Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 17

From Drift to Coherence: Stabilizing Beliefs in LLMs

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
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Amortising Bayesian Experimental Design for Sequential Information Gathering in LLMs

arXiv:2607. 03426v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning and world-knowledge capabilities, yet often struggle to gather information effectively across the multi-turn interactions required in sequential decision-making settings.

By Jakob Hartmann, James Harvey, Jhonathan Navott, Erik Y. Wang, Luckeciano C. Melo, Flaviu Cipcigan, Cheng Zhang, Alessandro Abate