Inference-Time

In this work, we present FRIGID, a framework with a novel diffusion language model that generates molecular structures conditioned on mass spectra via intermediate fingerprint representations and determined chemical formulae, training at the scale of hundreds of millions of unlabeled structures. We then demonstrate how forward fragmentation models enable inference-time scaling by identifying spectrum-inconsistent fragments and refining them through targeted remasking and denoising. While FRIGID already achieves strong performance with its diffusion base, inference-time scaling significantly improves its accuracy, surpassing 18% Top-1 accuracy on the challenging MassSpecGym benchmark and tripling the Top-1 accuracy of the leading methods on NPLIB1. Further empirical analyses show that FRIGID exhibits log-linear performance scaling with increasing inference-time compute, opening a promising new direction for continued improvements in de novo structural elucidation. FRIGID code is publicly available at https://github.com/coleygroup/FRIGID

Test-time scaling has become a powerful way to improve large language models. However, existing methods are best suited to short, bounded outputs that can be directly compared, ranked or refined. Long-horizon coding agents violate this premise: each attempt produces an extended trajectory of actions, observations, errors, and partial progress taken by the agent. In this setting, the main challenge is no longer generating more attempts, but representing prior experience in a form that can be effectively selected from and reused. We propose a test-time scaling framework for agentic coding based on compact representations of rollout trajectories. Our framework converts each rollout into a structured summary that preserves its salient hypotheses, progress, and failure modes while discarding low-signal trace details. This representation enables two complementary forms of inference-time scaling. For parallel scaling, we introduce Recursive Tournament Voting (RTV), which recursively narrows a population of rollout summaries through small-group comparisons. For sequential scaling, we adapt Parallel-Distill-Refine (PDR) to the agentic setting by conditioning new rollouts on summaries distilled from prior attempts. Our method consistently improves the performance of frontier coding agents across SWE-Bench Verified and Terminal-Bench v2.0. For example, by using our method Claude-4.5-Opus improves from 70.9% to 77.6% on SWE-Bench Verified (mini-SWE-agent) and 46.9% to 59.1% on Terminal-Bench v2.0 (Terminus 1). Our results suggest that test-time scaling for long-horizon agents is fundamentally a problem of representation, selection, and reuse.

LLM-powered systems require complex multi-step decision-making abilities to solve real-world tasks, yet current planning approaches face a trade-off between the high latency of inference-time search and the limited generalization of supervised fine-tuning. To address this limitation, we introduce \textbf{SGA-MCTS}, a framework that casts LLM planning as non-parametric retrieval. Offline, we leverage Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to explore the solution space and distill high-fidelity trajectories into State-Goal-Action (SGA) atoms. These atoms are de-lexicalized primitives that abstract concrete entities into symbolic slots, preserving reusable causal logic while discarding domain-specific noise. Online, a retrieval-augmented agent employs a hybrid symbolic-semantic mechanism to fetch relevant SGAs and re-ground them into the current context as soft reasoning hints. Empirical results on complex benchmarks demonstrate that this paradigm enables frozen, open-weights models to match the performance of SOTA systems (e.g., GPT-5) without task-specific fine-tuning. By effectively amortizing the heavy computational cost of search, SGA-MCTS achieves System 2 reasoning depth at System 1 inference speeds, rendering autonomous planning both scalable and real-time feasible.

Activation-based steering enables inference-time personalization of large language models, but its effects in educational applications are not well understood. We study activation-based persona vectors representing seven character traits in short-answer generation and automated scoring on the ASAP-SAS benchmark, across three language models spanning dense and mixture-of-experts architectures. Persona steering lowers answer quality overall, with much larger effects on open-ended English Language Arts (ELA) prompts than on factual science prompts. Interpretive and argumentative tasks are particularly sensitive, showing up to 11$\times$ larger degradation. On the scoring side, we observe predictable valence-aligned calibration shifts: evil'' and impolite'' scorers grade more harshly, while good'' and optimistic'' scorers grade more leniently. ELA tasks are 2.5-3$\times$ more susceptible to scorer personalization than science tasks, and the mixture-of-experts model shows roughly 6$\times$ larger calibration shifts than the dense models. To our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically examine the effects of activation-steered persona traits in educational generation and scoring. Our findings highlight the need for task- and architecture-aware calibration when deploying personalized models in educational settings.

The recent success of inference-time scaling in large language models has inspired similar explorations in video diffusion. In particular, motivated by the existence of "golden noise" that enhances video quality, prior work has attempted to improve inference by optimising or searching for better initial noise. However, these approaches have notable limitations: they either rely on priors imposed at the beginning of noise sampling or on rewards evaluated only on the denoised and decoded videos. This leads to error accumulation, delayed and sparse reward signals, and prohibitive computational cost, which prevents the use of stronger search algorithms. Crucially, stronger search algorithms are precisely what could unlock substantial gains in controllability, sample efficiency and generation quality for video diffusion, provided their computational cost can be reduced. To fill in this gap, we enable efficient inference-time scaling for video diffusion through latent reward guidance, which provides intermediate, informative and efficient feedback along the denoising trajectory. We introduce a latent reward model that scores partially denoised latents at arbitrary timesteps with respect to visual quality, motion quality, and text alignment. Building on this model, we propose LatSearch, a novel inference-time search mechanism that performs Reward-Guided Resampling and Pruning (RGRP). In the resampling stage, candidates are sampled according to reward-normalised probabilities to reduce over-reliance on the reward model. In the pruning stage, applied at the final scheduled step, only the candidate with the highest cumulative reward is retained, improving both quality and efficiency. We evaluate LatSearch on the VBench-2.0 benchmark and demonstrate that it consistently improves video generation across multiple evaluation dimensions compared to the baseline Wan2.1 model.

Protein function relies on dynamic conformational ensembles, yet current generative models like AlphaFold3 often fail to produce ensembles that match experimental data. Recent experiment-guided generators attempt to address this by steering the reverse diffusion process. However, these methods are limited by fixed sampling horizons and sensitivity to initialization, often yielding thermodynamically implausible results. We introduce a general inference-time optimization framework to solve these challenges. First, we optimize over latent representations to maximize ensemble log-likelihood, rather than perturbing structures post hoc. This approach eliminates dependence on diffusion length, removes initialization bias, and easily incorporates external constraints. Second, we present novel sampling schemes for drawing Boltzmann-weighted ensembles. By combining structural priors from AlphaFold3 with force-field-based priors, we sample from their product distribution while balancing experimental likelihoods. Our results show that this framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art guidance, improving diversity, physical energy, and agreement with data in X-ray crystallography and NMR, often fitting the experimental data better than deposited PDB structures. Finally, inference-time optimization experiments maximizing ipTM scores reveal that perturbing AlphaFold3 embeddings can artificially inflate model confidence. This exposes a vulnerability in current design metrics, whose mitigation could offer a pathway to reduce false discovery rates in binder engineering.

Time series reasoning tasks often start with a natural language question and require targeted analysis of a time series. Evidence may span the full series or appear in a few short intervals, so the model must decide what to inspect. Most existing approaches encode the entire time series into a fixed representation before inference, regardless of whether or not the entire sequence is relevant. We introduce ARTIST, which formulates time-series reasoning as a sequential decision problem. ARTIST interleaves reasoning with adaptive temporal segment selection. It adopts a controller-reasoner architecture and uses reinforcement learning to train the controller role to select informative segments and the reasoner role to generate segment-conditioned reasoning traces and final answers. During inference, the model actively acquires task-relevant information instead of relying on a static summary of the full sequence. We use a novel hierarchical policy optimization approach for post-training that allows the model to excel in both segment selection and question-answering behavior. We evaluate ARTIST on six time-series reasoning benchmarks and compare it with large language models, vision-language models, and prior time-series reasoning systems. ARTIST improves average accuracy by 6.46 absolute percentage points over the strongest baseline. The largest gains appear on rare event localization and multi-segment reasoning tasks. Supervised fine-tuning improves performance, and reinforcement learning provides additional gains by optimizing question-adaptive segment selection. These results show that selective data use drives effective time-series reasoning.

RL-trained Lean theorem provers mode-collapse at inference time: on miniF2F-test with DeepSeek-Prover-V1.5-RL, doubling the i.i.d.\ sampling budget from $k{=}32$ to $k{=}64$ produces zero additional solved theorems (42/244 in both cases). A fixed schedule of 15 tactic skeletons breaks this plateau and recovers a $+45$ relative improvement at $k{=}16$ (mean $Δ= +12.3 \pm 4.2$ theorems across $n{=}3$ seeds, sign preserved in every seed). A controlled diversity ablation rules out the prompt-diversity confound: tactic skeletons help, paraphrases match the baseline, and irrelevant Lean comments actively degrade. A leave-one-out formalization-difficulty stratification reveals a structural-content gradient across the three perturbations. The phenomenon is RL-specific: V1.5-Base proves zero theorems regardless of intervention, identifying RL as the stage that creates the proof capability which subsequently collapses; extending to two additional 7B Lean provers, RL-trained DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B contributes $+3$ frontier solves no i.i.d. baseline can reach despite a flat aggregate, while SFT-trained Goedel-Prover does not ( $-10.0$ $\pm 4.4$ theorems, $n{=}3$, sign preserved every seed). Inference-time structural diversity is a cheap, complementary axis for RL-trained provers, orthogonal to scaling model size or training compute.

Recent breakthroughs of transformer-based diffusion models, particularly with Multimodal Diffusion Transformers (MMDiT) driven models like FLUX and Qwen Image, have facilitated thrilling experiences in visual generation. However, these models rely only on the interactions between textual conditions and visual features to produce semantically aligned images. Once the interactions fail to reflect the nuanced compositional structure of the prompt, the generated images might be unsatisfactory. Thus, a comprehensive understanding of how different blocks and their interactions with textual conditions is crucial for better understanding the intrinsic attributes and for enhancing their interactions accordingly to strengthen the prompts adherence. In this paper, we first develop a systematic pipeline to comprehensively investigate each block's functionality by \textit{removing}, \textit{disabling}, and \textit{enhancing} textual hidden-states at corresponding blocks. Our analysis reveals that 1) semantic information appears in earlier blocks and finer details are rendered in later blocks, 2) removing specific blocks is usually less disruptive than disabling text conditions, and 3) enhancing textual conditions in selective blocks improves semantic attributes. Building on these observations, we propose \method, a novel inference-time method for tailoring block-wise textual guidance. Our approach not only improves text-image alignment but also enables a range of downstream applications, including precise editing and inference acceleration. Extensive experiments demonstrated that our method outperforms various baselines and remains flexible across text-to-image generation, image editing, and inference acceleration. Our method improves T2I-Combench from 56.92% to 63.00% and GenEval from 66.42% to 71.63% on SD3.5, without sacrificing synthesis quality.

Gravitational-wave data analysis relies on accurate and efficient methods to extract physical information from noisy detector signals, yet the increasing rate and complexity of observations represent a growing challenge. Deep learning provides a powerful alternative to traditional inference, but existing neural models typically lack the flexibility to handle variations in data analysis settings. Such variations accommodate imperfect observations or are required for specialized tests, and could include changes in detector configurations, overall frequency ranges, or localized cuts. We introduce a flexible transformer-based architecture paired with a training strategy that enables adaptation to diverse analysis settings at inference time. Applied to parameter estimation, we demonstrate that a single flexible model, called Dingo-T1, can (i) analyze 48 gravitational-wave events from the third LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Observing Run under a wide range of analysis configurations, (ii) enable systematic studies of how detector and frequency configurations impact inferred posteriors, and (iii) perform inspiral-merger-ringdown consistency tests probing general relativity. Dingo-T1 also improves median sample efficiency on real events from a baseline of 1.4% to 4.2%. Our approach thus demonstrates flexible and scalable inference with a principled framework for handling missing or incomplete data, key capabilities for current and next-generation observatories.

Large Language Models perform well at natural language interpretation and reasoning, but their lack of formal correctness guarantees limits their adoption in regulated industries like finance and health-care that operate under strict policies. To address this limitation, we launched Automated Reasoning checks (ARc): a public service that (1) uses LLMs with optional human guidance to formalize natural language policies, allowing fine-grained control of the formalization process, and (2) uses inference-time autoformalization to validate logical correctness of natural language statements against those policies. ARc performs multiple redundant formalization steps at inference time, checking the formalizations for semantic equivalence. Our benchmarks show that ARc exceeds 99% soundness and achieves a near-zero false positive rate in identifying logical validity. Our approach produces auditable artifacts that substantiate the verification outcomes and can be used to improve the original text. ARc is the first commercial offering from a major cloud provider to integrate automated reasoning into a generative AI guardrail.

Reward models (RMs) have become essential for aligning large language models (LLMs), serving as scalable proxies for human evaluation in both training and inference. However, existing RMs struggle on knowledge-intensive and long-form tasks, where evaluating correctness requires grounding beyond the model's internal knowledge. This limitation hinders them from reliably discriminating subtle quality differences, especially when external evidence is necessary. To address this, we introduce OpenRM, a tool-augmented long-form reward model that systematically judges open-ended responses by invoking external tools to gather relevant evidence. We train OpenRM with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on over 27K synthesized pairwise examples generated through a controllable data synthesis framework. The training objective jointly supervises intermediate tool usage and final outcome accuracy, incentivizing our reward model to learn effective evidence-based judgment strategies. Extensive experiments on three newly-collected datasets and two widely-used benchmarks demonstrate that OpenRM substantially outperforms existing reward modeling approaches. As a further step, we integrate OpenRM into both inference-time response selection and training-time data selection. This yields consistent gains in downstream LLM alignment tasks, highlighting the potential of tool-augmented reward models for scaling reliable long-form evaluation.

Flow matching models generate high-fidelity molecular geometries but incur significant computational costs during inference, requiring hundreds of network evaluations. This inference overhead becomes the primary bottleneck when such models are employed in practice to sample large numbers of molecular candidates. This work discusses a training-free caching strategy that accelerates molecular geometry generation by predicting intermediate hidden states across solver steps. The proposed method operates directly on the SE(3)-equivariant backbone, is compatible with pretrained models, and is orthogonal to existing training-based accelerations and system-level optimizations. Experiments on the GEOM-Drugs dataset demonstrate that caching achieves a twofold reduction in wall-clock inference time at matched sample quality and a speedup of up to 3x compared to the base model with minimal sample quality degradation. Because these gains compound with other optimizations, applying caching alongside other general, lossless optimizations yield as much as a 7x speedup.

Test-time training (TTT) enhances model performance by explicitly updating designated parameters prior to each prediction to adapt to the test data. While TTT has demonstrated considerable empirical success, its theoretical underpinnings remain limited, particularly for nonlinear models. In this paper, we investigate the combination of TTT with in-context learning (ICL), where the model is given a few examples from the target distribution at inference time. We analyze this framework in the setting of single-index models, where the feature vector is drawn from a hidden low-dimensional subspace. For single-layer transformers trained with gradient-based algorithms and adopting TTT, we establish an upper bound on the prediction risk. Our theory reveals that TTT enables the single-layer transformers to adapt to both the feature vector and the link function, which vary across tasks. This creates a sharp contrast with ICL alone, which is theoretically difficult to adapt to shifts in the link function. Moreover, we provide the convergence rate with respect to the data length, showing the predictive error can be driven arbitrarily close to the noise level as the context size and the network width grow.

Reasoning is a hallmark of human intelligence, enabling adaptive decision-making in complex unfamiliar scenarios. In contrast, machine intelligence remains bound to training data, unable to dynamically refine solutions at inference. While recent advances have explored machine reasoning - trading inference-time compute for improved performance - they focus on verbal domains such as mathematical problem-solving where explicit rules govern step-by-step solution generation. Many tasks lack sufficient labelled data and require alternative performance improvement mechanisms, such as inference-time compute. Here we present a paradigm for machine reasoning in vision, enabling performance improvements with increasing thinking time (inference-time compute), even with limited labelled data. Our approach is inspired by dual-process theories of human cognition, integrating a fast-thinking System I module for generating and verifying solutions in familiar tasks, with a slow-thinking System II module that iteratively refines predictions using self-play reinforcement learning, even when task-specific data is limited. This paradigm involves proposing, competing over, and refining solutions until convergence. We demonstrate that extended inference-time compute yields superior performance compared to large-scale supervised learning, foundation models, and human experts in vision tasks. These include computer-vision benchmarks and cancer localisation across five organs, highlighting the potential of inference-time compute for data-scarce problems.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has led to dramatic improvements across a wide range of natural language tasks. Their performance on certain tasks can be further enhanced by incorporating test-time reasoning techniques. These inference-time advances have been adopted into the code domain, enabling complex software engineering (SWE) tasks such as code generation, test generation and issue resolution. However, the impact of different reasoning techniques on code-centric SWE tasks has not been systematically explored. In this work, we survey code reasoning techniques that underpin these capabilities, with a focus on test-time compute and inference-time reasoning paradigms. We examine a variety of code-specific reasoning methods and progressively build up to SWE agents, which combine planning, tool use, and multi-step interaction. We also compare the impact of different techniques on coding tasks, highlighting their relative importance and outlining open challenges and future research directions. Across commonly used models and benchmarks, we find that approaches exploiting code-specific signals (e.g., structure and execution feedback) are frequently associated with improved performance, motivating a dedicated study of code reasoning beyond natural-language reasoning.

Real-time market prediction services need correct predictions before a decision deadline; a correct prediction delivered late is not usable. TIP-Search studies time-predictable inference scheduling over fixed market predictors under uncertain load. It filters conformal latency-quantile feasible models, dispatches over finite workers, and uses shielded constrained online experts to trade accuracy, queue pressure, and deadline risk. On the optimized deployable pool, TIP-Search reaches 0.994 raw accuracy and 0.991 timely accuracy. On official TLOB FI-2010 h=10, TIP-Search++ raises timely accuracy from 0.156 to 0.239 and deadline satisfaction from 0.391 to 0.962. In matched h10 profiled systems replay, OCO-ACPO reaches 0.303 timely accuracy and 0.951 deadline satisfaction, with paired gains over RAMSIS/SneakPeek/utility-style comparators of $+0.00285$ timely accuracy ($p=0.0118$) and $+0.0146$ deadline satisfaction ($p=1.5{\times}10^{-5}$). SA-OCO-ACPO improves timely/deadline service by 0.188--0.417 over CPO under nonstationary stress. The claim is a systems scheduling result, not a broad LOB classifier leaderboard.