Consilience for Verifier-Free Test-Time Scaling

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09898v1
• Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:45:44 GMT
• Title: Consilience for Verifier-Free Test-Time Scaling
• Abstract summary: Verifier-free test-time scaling (or VF-TTS) is gaining extensive attention as a mechanism to enhance Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning.<n>We introduce consilience, a novel selection framework that explicitly evaluates the temporal asymmetry of confidence in reasoning.
• Score: 17.772780906204787
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Test-time scaling often uses an external verifier, such as compilers and test cases in coding or trained value functions in robotics applications, to obtain high-quality rollouts. Verifier-free test-time scaling (or VF-TTS) is gaining extensive attention as a mechanism to enhance Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, primarily because we do not have access to such high-quality verifiers in many real-world applications. Among existing VF-TTS methods, confidence-based VF-TTS methods, which compute and rank rollouts solely by confidence, are particularly promising. Such methods introduce near-zero overhead for sample evaluation and require minimal access to internal model states, making the methods highly flexible across models and tasks. In this paper, we demonstrate a critical limitation of existing confidence-based VF-TTS methods by showing that such methods catastrophically break down on complex tasks. We observe a very interesting phenomenon: uniformly high confidence frequently indicates a failure to explore, favoring confidently wrong answers. To address this, our core insight is that robust cognitive search requires a specific confidence trajectory pattern: such methods perform exploratory branching at the beginning, as manifested by low initial confidence, and converge to a high final confidence solution. To implement this insight, we introduce consilience, a novel selection framework that explicitly evaluates the temporal asymmetry of confidence in reasoning. We operationalize this via a combinatorial metric that actively penalizes high initial confidence while strictly demanding final certainty. Extensive experiments covering both graduate-level mathematics problems and free-form code generation demonstrate that consilience effectively outperforms existing baselines, validating our novel perspective on completion confidence.

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