Tag: self-consistency
All the articles with the tag "self-consistency".
Reasoning Models and Test-Time Compute
Updated:A reasoning model spends generated tokens as compute: trained with verifiable rewards, it learns to think before answering, and gets better the longer it thinks. What test-time compute means, how RL produces long chains and distillation passes them to small models, thinking budgets, and what 1,000, 10,000 and 50,000 thinking tokens cost in KV cache and time on two real models. Then a 1.5B model on checkable word problems, two seeds: answering directly, reasoning step by step, and voting over up to 16 chains, with the tokens each one costs, then on harder eight-step problems, where voting stops helping and a verifier could still gain.
Chain-of-Thought and Prompt Chaining
Updated:Asking a model for intermediate steps buys serial computation it can't do in one forward pass, and splitting a task into a chain of calls makes those steps inspectable and checkable. Why one forward pass is a fixed-depth circuit, zero-shot and few-shot chain-of-thought, self-consistency, chains with validation between steps, and how errors compound. Then a 1.5B model on problems of 1 to 8 serial steps, answered directly, reasoned in one call, chained one step per call, and chained with each step checked.