mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Two Calls, Two Moments, and the Vote-Accuracy Curve of Repeated LLM Inference

arXiv 2605.03379 ↗First posted 5 May 2026cs.LG cs.CLcited by 3

On the map: LLM reasoning → Test-time compute and efficient thinking

Abstract (arXiv)

Repeated sampling can improve LLM accuracy, and quantifying the gains from additional calls is essential for allocating test-time compute. We study binary decisions, a fundamental setting where repeated answers to the same question are aggregated by majority vote. We show that two independently sampled responses per example in a validation set with known answers constrain the latent distribution of example-level success probabilities to a class consistent with the paired outcomes. Optimizing over this class yields sharp accuracy and gain bounds at every finite voting budget. A shared large-sample confidence region accounts for validation uncertainty. We also obtain sharp infinite-vote bounds and moment-matched forecasts of the vote-accuracy curve. On QNLI and QQP, our method successfully distinguishes settings with voting gains above a target margin from those with little room for improvement.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 16 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 May 2026.

Builds on

16 of 37 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Estimating the Self-Consistency of LLMs23 Sep
  2. 2025Confidence Improves Self-Consistency in LLMs10 Feb
  3. 2023Let's Sample Step by Step: Adaptive-Consistency for Efficient Reasoning and Coding with LLMs19 May

Other references · 13

  1. 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 10,109
  2. 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,320
  3. 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,708
  4. 2018GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understandingcited by 4,899
  5. 2016SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Textcited by 4,148
  6. 2024Large Language Monkeys: Scaling Inference Compute with Repeated Samplingcited by 991
  7. 2023Semantic Uncertainty: Linguistic Invariances for Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generationcited by 819
  8. 2023SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Modelscited by 810
  9. 2024WildGuard: Open One-Stop Moderation Tools for Safety Risks, Jailbreaks, and Refusals of LLMscited by 496
  10. 2024Benchmarking Uncertainty Quantification Methods for Large Language Models with LM-Polygraphcited by 105
  11. 2024ConU: Conformal Uncertainty in Large Language Models with Correctness Coverage Guaranteescited by 65
  12. 2015Risk Bounds for the Majority Vote: From a PAC-Bayesian Analysis to a Learning Algorithmcited by 50
1 more
  1. 2025The Consistency Hypothesis in Uncertainty Quantification for Large Language Modelscited by 6

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

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  1. 2026From Discovery to Decision: Finite-Budget Recoverability in LLM Voting
  2. 2025Do We Truly Need So Many Samples? Multi-LLM Repeated Sampling Efficiently Scales Test-Time Compute
  3. 2025RoBoN: Routed Online Best-of-n for Test-Time Scaling with Multiple LLMs
  4. 2026Refining Over Resampling: Test-Time Self-Correction for LLM Reasoning
  5. 2025A Theoretical Study on Bridging Internal Probability and Self-Consistency for LLM Reasoning
  6. 2026Test-Time Scaling in Reasoning LLMs: Inference Regimes, Evaluation, and Reproducibility
  7. 2025Self-Consistency Is Losing Its Edge: Diminishing Returns and Rising Costs in Modern LLMs
  8. 2026A rigor-matched audit of periodic-step layer skipping for efficient llm inference: conflayers versus swift, with a supplemental analysis of trained routing alternatives