Theme · 34 episode(s)

Test-Time Compute

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Definition

Test-time compute is the amount of computation a model spends per query at inference — sampling more candidates, running longer chains-of-thought, searching deeper. Trading inference compute for capability has been one of the biggest stories of the last couple of years.

Episodes covering this

  1. 233
    Why a Model Can Grade an Answer But Not Write the Answer Key
    Judging Is Not Enumerating: Silent Omissions in LLM-Authored Acceptable Sets
    Chen, Chen, Lin et al. · University of Macau·20 min·Aug 04, 2026
  2. 225
    How a Frozen Model Went From Zero to Sixty Percent by Borrowing Another's Thinking
    Reasoning Fine-Tuning Induces Persistent Latent Policy States
    Harrasse, Lan, Batra et al. · Martian·15 min·Jul 22, 2026
  3. 217
    Why an AI Called Fourteen Broken Figures Perfect, And What It Reveals About Test-Time Compute
    Interaction Scaling: Grounding the Third Axis of Test-Time Compute
    Li, Shi · Pine AI·14 min·Jul 14, 2026
  4. 197
    Twin Problems Suggest AI Reasoning Gains Are Mostly Better Fact Recall
    IsoSci: A Benchmark of Isomorphic Cross-Domain Science Problems for Evaluating Reasoning versus Knowledge Retrieval in LLMs
    Abdaljalil, Serpedin, Kurban · Texas A&M University·17 min·Jul 03, 2026
  5. 191
    How One Researcher Beat GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 by Judging Their Answers, Not Improving Them
    Modality-Driven Search with Holistic Trace Judging for ARC-AGI-2
    Land · Independent Researcher·26 min·Jul 02, 2026
  6. 173
    The Free Step-Level Grader Hiding in Every RL Training Run
    Neglected Free Lunch from Post-training: Progress Advantage for LLM Agents
    Oh, Li, Park et al. · University of Wisconsin–Madison·22 min·Jun 25, 2026
  7. 171
    The Safety Decision a Model Makes Before It Thinks a Word
    Do Thinking Tokens Help with Safety?
    Ri, Panigrahi, Arora · Princeton Language and Intelligence·25 min·Jun 25, 2026
  8. 169
    Why Better Bug Reports Can Make AI Coding Agents Worse
    SHERLOC: Structured Diagnostic Localization for Code Repair Agents
    Tamoyan, Narenthiran, Arakelyan et al. · NVIDIA / TU Darmstadt·24 min·Jun 24, 2026
  9. 167
    How Teaching an AI to Predict, Not Act, Made It a Better Actor
    Qwen-AgentWorld: Language World Models for General Agents
    Team, Zuo, Xiao et al.·27 min·Jun 24, 2026
  10. 161
    A Robot That Plays Before You Give It a Job, And Why That Beats Retrying
    Playful Agentic Robot Learning
    Zhang, Ge, Yoo et al. · University of California·19 min·Jun 19, 2026
  11. 154
    How a 7B Model Out-Investigates a 72B One by Choosing What to Look At
    Native Active Perception as Reasoning for Omni-Modal Understanding
    Xing, Xu, Wang et al. · The Chinese University of Hong Kong·21 min·Jun 18, 2026
  12. 146
    How an Innocent README Can Freeze an AI Agent's Safety Check for an Hour
    From Shield to Target: Denial-of-Service Attacks on LLM-Based Agent Guardrails
    Zhou, Wang, Ma et al. · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology·26 min·Jun 15, 2026
  13. 141
    How Two Tokens Reopened a Reasoning Method the Field Had Given Up On
    Demystifying Hidden-State Recurrence: Switchable Latent Reasoning with On-Policy Reinforcement Learning
    Yang, Chen, Wu et al. · HKUST(GZ)·29 min·Jun 12, 2026
  14. 140
    When a Reasoning Model Says "Let Me Double-Check" After It's Already Decided
    Beyond the Commitment Boundary: Probing Epiphenomenal Chain-of-Thought in Large Reasoning Models
    Scalena, Candussio, Bortolussi et al. · University of Groningen / University of Milano-Bicocca·27 min·Jun 12, 2026
  15. 133
    How MiniMax Turned a Reward-Hacking Disaster Into Olympiad Gold
    MaxProof: Scaling Mathematical Proof with Generative-Verifier RL and Population-Level Test-Time Scaling
    Chen, Zhang, Zhang et al. · MiniMax / The Chinese University of Hong Kong·34 min·Jun 12, 2026
  16. 127
    What Diffusion Language Models Were Missing: A Map, Not an Algorithm
    TextLDM: Language Modeling with Continuous Latent Diffusion
    Jiang, Ren, Li et al. · JoyFuture Academy / HIT·30 min·Jun 11, 2026
  17. 119
    Beating Reinforcement Learning Without Ever Touching the Model's Weights
    Agentic Monte Carlo: Simulating Reinforcement Learning for Black-Box Agents
    Hwang, Suri, Villecroze et al. · Layer6 AI·22 min·Jun 05, 2026
  18. 118
    Why the Best-Aligned AI Models Are the Easiest to Trick Into Producing Harm
    Safety Paradox: How Enhanced Safety Awareness Leaves LLMs Vulnerable to Posterior Attack
    Hoang, Le, Xu et al. · Singapore University of Technology and Design·23 min·Jun 05, 2026
  19. 117
    How an Open AI System Verified 672 Hard Math Proofs for Under $300
    Goedel-Architect: Streamlining Formal Theorem Proving with Blueprint Generation and Refinement
    Chung, Cai, Li et al. · Princeton University·26 min·Jun 05, 2026
  20. 116
    Why Streaming Half a Reasoning Chain Beats Sending the Whole Thing
    Streaming Communication in Multi-Agent Reasoning
    Yang, Xu, Wang et al. · HKUST (GZ)·26 min·Jun 04, 2026
  21. 114
    Agents That Rewrite Their Own Weights Instead of Just Taking Notes
    Scaling Self-Evolving Agents via Parametric Memory
    Ren, Luo, Yang et al. · Peking University / Alibaba Group·26 min·Jun 04, 2026
  22. 108
    The Reasoning Cliff: Why Thinking Longer Makes Models Worse at Exact Step-by-Step Tasks
    The Deterministic Horizon: When Extended Reasoning Fails and Tool Delegation Becomes Necessary
    Guo, Wu, Yiu · The University of Hong Kong·32 min·Jun 03, 2026
  23. 099
    How an Open-Book Trick Teaches a Model to Catch Its Own Mistakes
    Self-Trained Verification for Training- and Test-Time Self-Improvement
    Wu, Raghunathan · Carnegie Mellon University·21 min·May 29, 2026
  24. 088
    Two Levers for Self-Improving AI: When Rewriting Code Isn't Enough
    SIA: Self Improving AI with Harness & Weight Updates
    Hebbar, Manawat, Verboomen et al. · Hexo Labs·25 min·May 27, 2026
  25. 085
    Why Long-Context Models Might Need Compute, Not Capacity, Before Eviction
    Language Models Need Sleep
    Lee, McLeish, Goldstein et al. · Carnegie Mellon University·24 min·May 26, 2026
  26. 081
    When Reasoning Models Decide Before They Think: Detecting and Fixing Premature Confidence
    Understanding and Mitigating Premature Confidence for Better LLM Reasoning
    Gai, Zeng, Baek et al. · Carnegie Mellon University·25 min·May 26, 2026
  27. 077
    Reading a Model's Confidence Curve to Decide When Chain-of-Thought Is Worth It
    When Do LLMs Reason? A Dynamical Systems View via Entropy Phase Transitions
    Xia, Wang, Tang et al. · State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence·22 min·May 25, 2026
  28. 068
    The OS Trick That Makes Tree Search Practical for Coding Agents
    DeltaBox: Scaling Stateful AI Agents with Millisecond-Level Sandbox Checkpoint/Rollback
    Dong, He, Hou et al. · Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems·27 min·May 22, 2026
  29. 048
    How a 30B Open Model Reached Olympiad Gold With the Right Recipe
    Achieving Gold-Medal-Level Olympiad Reasoning via Simple and Unified Scaling
    Li, Zhan, Zhang et al. · Shanghai AI Laboratory / The Chinese University of Hong Kong·31 min·May 16, 2026
  30. 041
    When the Iteration Teaches the Model to Skip the Iteration
    Solve the Loop: Attractor Models for Language and Reasoning
    Fein-Ashley, Rashidinejad · University of Southern California·30 min·May 13, 2026
  31. 036
    Sparse Attention Was the Wrong Frame. Treat It as Geometry Instead.
    Sparse Attention as a Range Searching Problem: Towards an Inference-Efficient Index for KV Cache
    Dehghankar, Asudeh · University of Illinois Chicago·24 min·May 11, 2026
  32. 032
    A Sticky-Note for Every Layer: Letting Transformers Remember What They Were Just Thinking
    State Stream Transformer (SST) V2: Parallel Training of Nonlinear Recurrence for Latent Space Reasoning
    Aviss · Fifth Dimension·23 min·May 09, 2026
  33. 028
    Teaching a Model to Hire Copies of Itself: Recursive Agent Optimization
    Recursive Agent Optimization
    Gandhi, Chakraborty, Wang et al. · Carnegie Mellon University·23 min·May 08, 2026
  34. 003
    How to Pick the Best of Sixteen Coding Agent Rollouts
    Scaling Test-Time Compute for Agentic Coding
    Kim, Yang, Niu et al. · Meta Superintelligence Labs / University of Washington·17 min·May 01, 2026

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