arXiv AI
6d ago

Speculative Evaluation of Stochastic LLMs

The paper introduces Speculative Evaluation, a method to reduce variance in evaluating stochastic large language models (LLMs) under a fixed rollout budget. It employs a Hierarchical Bayesian Neyman (HBN) policy that first runs a short uniform pilot, then pools task-level success counts via a hierarchical Bayesian model to compute posterior expectations of task-level sampling variances. Using these expectations, the method applies exact positive-integer Neyman allocation to allocate rollouts, and an asynchronous variant (HBN-async) speculatively executes continuations from partial pilot feedback to mitigate synchronization overhead. Across six checkpoints and 18 benchmark groups, Speculative Evaluation achieves 12.8%-33.6% lower variance compared to uniform allocation, outperforming empirical and independent Bayesian baselines, and demonstrates practical benefits in real-generation experiments.

By Qianli Shen, Xiang Li, Ruomeng Ding, Yanxi Chen, Daoyuan Chen, Yaliang Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Early Verdicts, Better Budgets: Sequential Adaptive Rollout Allocation for Compute-Efficient RLVR

arXiv:2607. 26253v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is bottlenecked by rollout generation, yet many sampled prompts produce saturated groups (all responses correct or all incorrect) whose zero reward variance yields no policy-gradient signal.

By Pixel Nomand, Elena Voss, Marcus Hale, Sofia Reyes