Strategic Scaling of Test-Time Compute: A Bandit Learning Approach

Scaling test-time compute has emerged as an effective strategy for improving the performance of large language models. However, existing methods typically allocate compute uniformly across all queries, overlooking variation in query difficulty. To address this inefficiency, we formulate test-time compute allocation as a novel bandit learning problem and propose adaptive algorithms that estimate query difficulty on the fly and allocate compute accordingly. Compared to uniform allocation, our algorithms allocate more compute to challenging queries while maintaining accuracy on easier ones. Among challenging queries, our algorithms further learn to prioritize solvable instances, effectively reducing excessive computing on unsolvable queries. We theoretically prove that our algorithms achieve better compute efficiency than uniform allocation and empirically validate their effectiveness on math and code benchmarks. Specifically, our algorithms achieve up to an 11.10% performance improvement (15.04% relative) on the MATH-500 dataset and up to a 7.41% performance improvement (14.40% relative) on LiveCodeBench.

Positional Attention for Efficient BERT-Based Named Entity Recognition

This paper presents a framework for Named Entity Recognition (NER) leveraging the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model in natural language processing (NLP). NER is a fundamental task in NLP with broad applicability across downstream applications. While BERT has established itself as a state-of-the-art model for entity recognition, fine-tuning it from scratch for each new application is computationally expensive and time-consuming. To address this, we propose a cost-efficient approach that integrates positional attention mechanisms into the entity recognition process and enables effective customization using pre-trained parameters. The framework is evaluated on a Kaggle dataset derived from the Groningen Meaning Bank corpus and achieves strong performance with fewer training epochs. This work contributes to the field by offering a practical solution for reducing the training cost of BERT-based NER systems while maintaining high accuracy.