enhancing reasoning accuracy in large language models during inference time

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21301v1
• Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:00:07 GMT
• Title: enhancing reasoning accuracy in large language models during inference time
• Abstract summary: Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit strong linguistic abilities while remaining unreliable on multi-step reasoning tasks.<n>We study inference-time techniques to improve the reasoning accuracy of LLMs.
• Score: 1.0282918759603745
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit strong linguistic abilities while remaining unreliable on multi-step reasoning tasks, particularly when deployed without additional training or fine-tuning. In this work, we study inference-time techniques to improve the reasoning accuracy of LLMs. We systematically evaluate three classes of inference-time strategies: (i) self-consistency via stochastic decoding, where the model is sampled multiple times using controlled temperature and nucleus sampling and the most frequent final answer is selected; (ii) dual-model reasoning agreement, where outputs from two independent models are compared and only consistent reasoning traces are trusted; and (iii) self-reflection, where the model critiques and revises its own reasoning. Across all evaluated methods, we employ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) [1] prompting to elicit explicit intermediate reasoning steps before generating final answers. In this work, we provide a controlled comparative evaluation across three inference-time strategies under identical prompting and verification settings. Our experiments on LLM [2] show that self-consistency with nucleus sampling and controlled temperature value yields the substantial gains, achieving a 9% to 15% absolute improvement in accuracy over greedy single-pass decoding, well-suited for low-risk domains, offering meaningful gains with minimal overhead. The dual-model approach provides additional confirmation for model reasoning steps thus more appropriate for moderate-risk domains, where higher reliability justifies additional compute. Self-reflection offers only marginal improvements, suggesting limited effectiveness for smaller non-reasoning models at inference time.

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