Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters
๐ Abstract
The paper studies how large language models (LLMs) can improve their outputs by using more test-time computation. It analyzes two main mechanisms for scaling test-time compute: (1) searching against dense, process-based verifier reward models, and (2) updating the model's distribution over a response adaptively, given the prompt at test time. The key findings are:
- The effectiveness of different approaches to scaling test-time compute critically varies depending on the difficulty of the prompt.
- Applying a "compute-optimal" scaling strategy, which adaptively allocates test-time compute per prompt, can improve the efficiency of test-time compute scaling by more than 4x compared to a best-of-N baseline.
- On problems where a smaller base model attains somewhat non-trivial success rates, test-time compute can be used to outperform a 14x larger model in a FLOPs-matched evaluation.
๐ Q&A
[01] Scaling Test-Time Compute via Verifiers
1. What are the key components for using verifiers to scale test-time compute?
- Training process-based reward models (PRMs) that can provide per-step correctness predictions, without requiring human labels
- Exploring different search methods against the PRM, including best-of-N weighted, beam search, and lookahead search
- Finding that the effectiveness of the search methods depends on the difficulty of the prompt, motivating a "compute-optimal" scaling strategy
2. How does the compute-optimal scaling strategy work?
- It selects the best-performing search strategy (e.g. beam search, lookahead search) adaptively for each prompt, based on an estimate of the prompt's difficulty.
- Using oracle difficulty bins, the compute-optimal strategy can outperform a best-of-N baseline by up to 4x, by more effectively allocating the test-time compute budget.
- Even using a model-predicted notion of difficulty, the compute-optimal strategy can still provide substantial improvements over a fixed strategy.
3. How do the different search methods compare in terms of performance?
- Beam search significantly outperforms best-of-N with smaller generation budgets, but the improvements diminish as the budget is scaled up.
- Lookahead search, which uses lookahead rollouts to improve the accuracy of the PRM's value estimation, generally underperforms other methods at the same generation budget.
- The effectiveness of the search methods depends on the difficulty of the prompt, with beam search performing better on harder problems and best-of-N performing better on easier problems.
[02] Refining the Proposal Distribution
1. How do the authors enable LLMs to iteratively refine their own answers?
- They finetune the base LLM to enable it to critique and revise its own outputs in an iterative fashion, using an approach similar to the STaR method.
- This finetuning is necessary because prompting off-the-shelf models is not effective at enabling effective revisions at test time.
2. How do the authors compare sequential revisions vs. parallel sampling?
- They find that on easier problems, sequential revisions outperform parallel sampling, as the model's initial samples are more likely to be on the right track and just need refinement.
- On harder problems, parallel sampling performs better, as it allows the model to explore different high-level problem solving strategies.
3. How do the authors select the best answer from the revision sequence?
- They explore two approaches:
- Using a separate ORM verifier trained on the revision model's outputs to select the best answer within each revision trajectory and across trajectories.
- Using majority voting across all answers in the revision trajectories.
- They find that majority voting provides smoother scaling behavior compared to the hierarchical ORM-based approach.
[03] Exchanging Pretraining and Test-Time Compute
1. How do the authors define the exchange rate between pretraining and test-time compute?
- They use the common approximation that pretraining FLOPs scale with model parameters and number of pretraining tokens, while inference FLOPs scale with the number of generated tokens.
- They define a ratio R that captures the relative scale of pretraining vs. inference tokens, and analyze the tradeoffs for different values of R.
2. What are the key findings on exchanging pretraining and test-time compute?
- For easier and intermediate questions, and even some harder questions, additional test-time compute can outperform scaling up pretraining, in a FLOPs-matched setting.
- However, on the most challenging questions, scaling up pretraining is more effective than scaling up test-time compute using the current approaches.
- This suggests that while test-time compute scaling can already be preferable to pretraining scaling in some settings, further improvements to test-time compute strategies are needed to make it fully exchangeable with pretraining.
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