{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/sample-scrutinize-and-scale-effective","title":"Sample, Scrutinize and Scale: Effective Inference-Time Search by Scaling Verification","arxiv_id":"2502.01839","date":"2025-02-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Eric Zhao","Pranjal Awasthi","Sreenivas Gollapudi"],"abstract":"Sampling-based search, a simple paradigm for utilizing test-time compute, involves generating multiple candidate responses and selecting the best one -- typically by verifying each response for correctness. In this paper, we study the scaling trends governing sampling-based search. Among our findings is that simply scaling up a minimalist implementation that uses only random sampling and direct self-verification results in sustained performance improvements that, for example, elevate the Gemini v1.5 Pro model's reasoning capabilities past that of o1-Preview on popular benchmarks. We partially attribute the scalability of sampling-based search to a phenomenon of implicit scaling, where sampling a larger pool of responses in turn improves verification accuracy. We further identify two useful principles for improving self-verification capabilities with test-time compute: (1) comparing across responses provides helpful signals about the locations of errors and hallucinations, and (2) different model output styles are useful for different contexts -- chains of thought are useful for reasoning but harder to verify. We also find that, though accurate verification can be elicited, frontier models demonstrate remarkably weak out-of-box verification capabilities and introduce a benchmark to measure progress on these deficiencies.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01839v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01839v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"sample-scrutinize-and-scale-effective","repo_url":"https://github.com/google-research/google-research","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"attribute","task_name":"Attribute"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2502.01839","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}