A solvable model of inference-time scaling

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission17868 Authors

Keywords: test time compute, inference time compute, scaling law, higher dimensional statistics

TL;DR: We propose a solvable model of inference-time scaling.

Abstract:

Recent developments in large language models have shown advantages in reallocating a notable share of computational resource from training time to inference time. However, the principles behind inference time scaling are not well understood. In this paper, we introduce an analytically tractable model of inference-time scaling: Bayesian linear regression with a reward-weighted sampler. We study this problem in the high-dimensional regime, where the deterministic equivalents dictate a closed-form expression for the posterior predictive mean and variance. We analyze the generalization error when training data are sampled from a teacher model. We draw $k$ inference-time samples and select via softmax at a temperature applied to a quadratic reward.
When the reward is not too different from the teacher, the generalization error decreases monotonically with increasing inference time samples $k$. However, the specific reward that optimizes inference-time selection generally differs from the teacher. In contrast, substantial reward misspecification induces a finite optimal $k$ beyond which more sampling can increase the generalization error, consistent with recent empirical observations. Furthermore, for fixed $k$ there exists an optimal sampling temperature. In the “best-of-$k$” limit with the teacher as reward, we prove that the generalization error decays as $\Theta(1/k^2)$ and determine the leading coefficient via extreme value theory. These formulas delineate domains where scaling inference-time computation is provably preferable to collecting more data. Finally, we demonstrate that when task difficulty increases, the previously mentioned advantage of inference-time compute degrades.

Primary Area: learning theory

Submission Number: 17868