Think in Parallel, Answer as One: Logit Averaging for Open-Ended Reasoning

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission8582 Authors

Keywords: Large Language Model, Reasoning

Abstract: Majority voting has proven effective for close-ended question answering by aggregating parallel reasoning traces. However, it is not directly applicable to open-ended reasoning, where "majority" is undefined. We introduce THINKMERGE, a training-free, plug-and-play decoding strategy that runs K parallel reasoning traces and averages their next-token logits at synchronization points to produce a single coherent output. THINKMERGE integrates seamlessly with vLLM/SGLang and remains compatible with standard decoding techniques such as Top-p/Top-k. Empirically, it matches or surpasses majority voting on AIME and GPQA, while delivering consistent gains on open-ended coding tasks: on LiveCodeBench (hard), pass@1 improves by +8.28% for DeepCoder-14B-Preview and +7.58% for Qwen3-8B. These results demonstrate that parallel test-time scaling can benefit open-ended reasoning without relying on voting over complete outputs.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 8582