Recursive Self-Aggregation Unlocks Deep Thinking in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Venkatraman, Siddarth, Jain, Vineet, Mittal, Sarthak, Shah, Vedant, Obando-Ceron, Johan, Bengio, Yoshua, Bartoldson, Brian R., Kailkhura, Bhavya, Lajoie, Guillaume, Berseth, Glen, Malkin, Nikolay, Jain, Moksh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Venkatraman, Siddarth
Jain, Vineet
Mittal, Sarthak
Shah, Vedant
Obando-Ceron, Johan
Bengio, Yoshua
Bartoldson, Brian R.
Kailkhura, Bhavya
Lajoie, Guillaume
Berseth, Glen
Malkin, Nikolay
Jain, Moksh
author_facet Venkatraman, Siddarth
Jain, Vineet
Mittal, Sarthak
Shah, Vedant
Obando-Ceron, Johan
Bengio, Yoshua
Bartoldson, Brian R.
Kailkhura, Bhavya
Lajoie, Guillaume
Berseth, Glen
Malkin, Nikolay
Jain, Moksh
contents Test-time scaling methods improve the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by increasing the amount of compute used during inference to make a prediction. Inference-time compute can be scaled in parallel by choosing among multiple independent solutions or sequentially through self-refinement. We propose Recursive Self-Aggregation (RSA), a test-time scaling method inspired by evolutionary methods that combines the benefits of both parallel and sequential scaling. Each step of RSA refines a population of candidate reasoning chains through aggregation of subsets to yield a population of improved solutions, which are then used as the candidate pool for the next iteration. Empirically, RSA delivers substantial performance gains with increasing compute budgets across diverse tasks, model families and sizes. Notably, RSA with Gemini 3 Flash attains performance near the top of the ARC-AGI-2 public leaderboard. RSA also enables Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 to achieve competitive performance with larger reasoning models, including DeepSeek-R1 and o3-mini (high), outperforming purely parallel and sequential scaling strategies across AIME-25, HMMT-25, Reasoning Gym, LiveCodeBench-v6, and SuperGPQA. We further propose a novel aggregation-aware reinforcement learning approach that yields significant performance gains by training the model to combine solutions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_26626
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Recursive Self-Aggregation Unlocks Deep Thinking in Large Language Models
Venkatraman, Siddarth
Jain, Vineet
Mittal, Sarthak
Shah, Vedant
Obando-Ceron, Johan
Bengio, Yoshua
Bartoldson, Brian R.
Kailkhura, Bhavya
Lajoie, Guillaume
Berseth, Glen
Malkin, Nikolay
Jain, Moksh
Machine Learning
Test-time scaling methods improve the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by increasing the amount of compute used during inference to make a prediction. Inference-time compute can be scaled in parallel by choosing among multiple independent solutions or sequentially through self-refinement. We propose Recursive Self-Aggregation (RSA), a test-time scaling method inspired by evolutionary methods that combines the benefits of both parallel and sequential scaling. Each step of RSA refines a population of candidate reasoning chains through aggregation of subsets to yield a population of improved solutions, which are then used as the candidate pool for the next iteration. Empirically, RSA delivers substantial performance gains with increasing compute budgets across diverse tasks, model families and sizes. Notably, RSA with Gemini 3 Flash attains performance near the top of the ARC-AGI-2 public leaderboard. RSA also enables Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 to achieve competitive performance with larger reasoning models, including DeepSeek-R1 and o3-mini (high), outperforming purely parallel and sequential scaling strategies across AIME-25, HMMT-25, Reasoning Gym, LiveCodeBench-v6, and SuperGPQA. We further propose a novel aggregation-aware reinforcement learning approach that yields significant performance gains by training the model to combine solutions.
title Recursive Self-Aggregation Unlocks Deep Thinking in Large Language Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26626