arXiv:2608.09898cs.CLcs.LG2026-08

提出新方法让大模型推理时无需验证器,靠自信变化模式选正确答案。

Consilience for Verifier-Free Test-Time Scaling

论文配图:Consilience for Verifier-Free Test-Time Scaling
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用自信随时间的变化模式筛选推理路径,初期低自信、后期高自信才有效。
  • 在数学和代码任务中,新方法准确率显著高于现有无验证器方法。
  • 适合需要可靠推理但无外部验证器的场景,如教育、编程辅助等。

测试时扩展常依赖外部验证器(如编译器、测试用例或训练好的价值函数)获取高质量推理路径。无验证器的测试时扩展(VF-TTS)因在许多实际应用中缺乏高质量验证器而受到广泛关注。现有基于置信度的VF-TTS方法仅依据置信度计算和排序推理路径,具有近乎零的评估开销且对模型内部状态访问极少,灵活性高。本文揭示了此类方法在复杂任务上的严重缺陷:普遍高置信度往往意味着未充分探索,偏好自信错误的答案。核心洞察是:稳健的认知搜索需特定的置信度演变模式——初期低置信以实现探索性分支,最终收敛至高置信解。为此,我们提出consilience框架,通过组合式指标显式评估置信度的时间不对称性,主动惩罚高初始置信,同时严格要求最终确定性。大量实验涵盖研究生级数学题与自由格式代码生成,结果表明consilience显著优于现有基线,验证了对完成置信度的新视角。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Test-time scaling often uses an external verifier, such as compilers and test cases in coding or trained value functions in robotics applications, to obtain high-quality rollouts. Verifier-free test-time scaling (or VF-TTS) is gaining extensive attention as a mechanism to enhance Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, primarily because we do not have access to such high-quality verifiers in many real-world applications. Among existing VF-TTS methods, confidence-based VF-TTS methods, which compute and rank rollouts solely by confidence, are particularly promising. Such methods introduce near-zero overhead for sample evaluation and require minimal access to internal model states, making the methods highly flexible across models and tasks. In this paper, we demonstrate a critical limitation of existing confidence-based VF-TTS methods by showing that such methods catastrophically break down on complex tasks. We observe a very interesting phenomenon: uniformly high confidence frequently indicates a failure to explore, favoring confidently wrong answers. To address this, our core insight is that robust cognitive search requires a specific confidence trajectory pattern: such methods perform exploratory branching at the beginning, as manifested by low initial confidence, and converge to a high final confidence solution. To implement this insight, we introduce consilience, a novel selection framework that explicitly evaluates the temporal asymmetry of confidence in reasoning. We operationalize this via a combinatorial metric that actively penalizes high initial confidence while strictly demanding final certainty. Extensive experiments covering both graduate-level mathematics problems and free-form code generation demonstrate that consilience effectively outperforms existing baselines, validating our novel perspective on completion confidence.

大模型推理无验证器置信度分析测试时扩展

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