Two Calls, Two Moments, and the Vote-Accuracy Curve of Repeated LLM Inference
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
- 2025Estimating the Self-Consistency of LLMs23 Sep
- 2025Confidence Improves Self-Consistency in LLMs10 Feb
- 2023Let's Sample Step by Step: Adaptive-Consistency for Efficient Reasoning and Coding with LLMs19 May
Other references · 13
- 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 10,109
- 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,320
- 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,708
- 2018GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understandingcited by 4,899
- 2016SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Textcited by 4,148
- 2024Large Language Monkeys: Scaling Inference Compute with Repeated Samplingcited by 991
- 2023Semantic Uncertainty: Linguistic Invariances for Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generationcited by 819
- 2023SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Modelscited by 810
- 2024WildGuard: Open One-Stop Moderation Tools for Safety Risks, Jailbreaks, and Refusals of LLMscited by 496
- 2024Benchmarking Uncertainty Quantification Methods for Large Language Models with LM-Polygraphcited by 105
- 2024ConU: Conformal Uncertainty in Large Language Models with Correctness Coverage Guaranteescited by 65
- 2015Risk Bounds for the Majority Vote: From a PAC-Bayesian Analysis to a Learning Algorithmcited by 50
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
- 2026Partially Correlated Verifier Cascades in LLM Harnesses: Concave Log-Odds, Polynomial Reliability, and Blind-Spot Ceilingscited by 2
- 2026When Can Voting Help, Hurt, or Change Course? Exact Structure of Binary Test-Time Aggregationcited by 1
- 2026What Fixed-Rollout pass@k Evaluations Can Identifycited by 0
- 2026What Fixed-Rollout pass@k Evaluations Can Identify8 Sep 2026
- 2026Partially Correlated Verifier Cascades in LLM Harnesses: Concave Log-Odds, Polynomial Reliability, and Blind-Spot Ceilings15 Jul 2026
- 2026When Can Voting Help, Hurt, or Change Course? Exact Structure of Binary Test-Time Aggregation7 May 2026
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