这篇论文提出QuasiMoTTo,用相关采样替代独立采样,在推理和强化学习中大幅减少样本需求,效果显著。
论文提出QuasiMoTTo,利用准蒙特卡洛(QMC)生成相关但边际分布正确的样本,替换传统的独立同分布(i.i.d.)采样,减少冗余。在四个推理基准上,QuasiMoTTo以25-47%更少的样本达到相同的pass@k准确率,甚至常饱和边际保持采样器的理论上限。应用于策略梯度强化学习(GRPO)时,QuasiMoTTo以50%更少的训练步骤匹配i.i.d.性能。研究者还开发了无偏bootstrap估计器以评估相关采样器的pass@k。
QuasiMoTTo: Quasi-Monte Carlo Test-Time Scaling
Scaling inference compute, by generating many parallel attempts per problem, is a costly but reliable lever for improving language model capabilities. By default these attempts are generated independently, wasting inference compute on redundant solutions. This waste seems unavoidable. After all, independence is what makes parallel sampling trivial to scale. However, this tradeoff is not fundamental: there is a rich design space of samplers that generate correlated but exact samples entirely in parallel. We explore this design space as an avenue for improving sample efficiency in scaling inference compute and reinforcement learning (RL). Concretely, we introduce QuasiMoTTo, which uses correlated samples as a drop-in replacement for i.i.d. samples. To generate these samples, QuasiMoTTo uses a reparameterization of autoregressive sampling as inverse-CDF sampling and draws the underlying uniforms with quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC); because QMC spreads the uniforms out more evenly than i.i.d., the resulting samples cover the output space with far less redundancy. Even though the batch is correlated, each sample is marginally distributed according to the language model, so we can use the batch for policy-gradient training. Our empirical analysis focuses on understanding how efficiently QuasiMoTTo can turn compute into performance. To evaluate correlated samplers, whose dependence breaks standard pass@k estimators, we first develop an unbiased bootstrap estimator. Across four reasoning benchmarks, QuasiMoTTo matches i.i.d. pass@k accuracy with 25-47% fewer samples. Strikingly, QuasiMoTTo often saturates an upper bound on pass@k that holds for any marginal-preserving sampler. We also apply QuasiMoTTo to policy-gradient RL (GRPO) where it matches i.i.d. performance with 50% fewer training steps. These gains come from higher coverage, which yields a stronger learning signal per batch.