Mode-conditioning unlocks superior test-time compute scaling

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission20773 Authors

Keywords: test-time compute, reasoning, diversity

Abstract: Parallel sampling promises substantial gains in test-time scaling, but its effectiveness is sharply limited by diversity collapse, where models concentrate on a few modes and repeated samples reproduce the same mistakes. We propose the mode-conditioning (ModC) framework, which explicitly allocates test-time compute across reasoning modes using either specialist models or mode-specific prefixes. ModC consistently improves scaling across controlled graph-search tasks and large-scale reasoning benchmarks, spanning model families and sizes from 0.5B to 7B. On OpenThoughts, fine-tuning Qwen2.5-7B with ModC achieves an 8× efficiency gain over standard training while also improving the maximum attainable Pass@k. We further show that gradient clustering enables ModC without explicit mode labels, yielding up to 10% gains on datasets such as NuminaMath. These results demonstrate that standard training underutilizes the diversity in data, and that ModC provides a simple, effective remedy for unlocking the full benefits of diversity in test-time scaling.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 20773