Sample, Mix, or Verify? Allocating Test-Time Compute under Imperfect Verifiers
A common way to make language models and agents more accurate is to spend more compute at inference time: generate many candidate solutions and submit the one a verifier prefers. Success then requires that some candidate is correct and that the verifier picks it. The first grows predictably with the number of samples; the second does not, because real verifiers (unit tests, majority votes, LLM judges, reward models) accept wrong answers, reject right ones, and make correlated mistakes. With a fixed budget, a practitioner must decide how many samples to draw, which models to draw them from, and how much to spend on verification, and today these choices are made by rules of thumb. We introd...
| Authors | Srinivasan Iyengar |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 16 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 October 2026 |
Popularity, last 5 days
0 now. Counts as reported by the source, snapshotted daily by Silytics.
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 23 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.