Test-Time Augmentation for LLMs: When Input Diversity Beats Output Diversity at Matched Compute

Test-time scaling improves LLM accuracy but multiplies inference cost, making the accuracy gained per unit of compute the metric that matters in deployment. Self-consistency is one of the established approaches, which spends this budget entirely on the output side by sampling repeated reasoning paths. We study Test-Time Augmentation (TTA), which extends self-consistency by also perturbing the input, aggregating predictions across transformed versions of the input, and ask whether input-side diversity converts compute into accuracy more efficiently than output-side diversity. We perform a systematic, matched-compute comparison: we evaluate three simple input-side strategies (semantic rephrasing, lexical perturbations, and visual transformations) across six datasets covering general and multilingual knowledge, mathematical reasoning, multi-modal question answering, and sentiment classification, against chain-of-thought prompting and self-consistency. Semantic rephrasing delivers consistent and statistically significant accuracy gains while Pareto-dominating self-consistency on cost-effectiveness, delivering roughly 1.8X more accuracy per dollar and outperforming it on five of six tasks. We further analyze the number of augmentations, multi-modal strategies, and base model scaling, finding that TTA is most cost-effective for mid-tier models where a stronger model is unavailable or too expensive. Our findings indicate that for current mid-tier LLMs, varying the input converts inference compute into accuracy more efficiently than varying the reasoning path alone. The TTA implementation is available at https://github.com/aws-samples/sample-genai-reflection-for-bedrock.

Are we Merging the Right Models? Impact of Expert Training Duration on Model Merging for LLMs

Multi-task model merging combines separately trained expert models into a single model that handles all tasks without co-training. Standard practice merges experts at their optimal validation loss. We challenge this convention by systematically studying how training duration of domain experts affects the quality of the merged model. We fine-tune experts on five domains (Math, Code, Instruction Following, Multilingual, and Safety) across three model sizes (Qwen 3.5 0.8B, 2B, and 4B), saving checkpoints from 25\% to 500\% of the optimal training steps and evaluating five merging methods at each duration. Our findings reveal a striking method-dependent pattern: simple averaging degrades sharply with overfitting, while sparsification-based methods achieve their best performance well past the validation optimum. We formalize this through bias-variance decomposition analysis, drawing a parallel to random forests where averaging benefits from high-variance individual learners. These results suggest that training duration and merging method should be chosen jointly rather than independently.

Finding the Sweet Spot: Trading Quality, Cost, and Speed During Inference-Time LLM Reflection

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve, practitioners face increasing options for enhancing inference-time performance without model retraining, including budget tuning and multi-step techniques like self-reflection. While these methods improve output quality, they create complex trade-offs among accuracy, cost, and latency that remain poorly understood across different domains. This paper systematically compares self-reflection and budget tuning across mathematical reasoning and translation tasks. We evaluate prominent LLMs, including Anthropic Claude, Amazon Nova, and Mistral families, along with other models under varying reflection depths and compute budgets to derive Pareto optimal performance frontiers. Our analysis reveals substantial domain dependent variation in self-reflection effectiveness, with performance gains up to 220\% in mathematical reasoning. We further investigate how reflection round depth and feedback mechanism quality influence performance across model families. To validate our findings in a real-world setting, we deploy a self-reflection enhanced marketing content localisation system at Lounge by Zalando, where it shows market-dependent effectiveness, reinforcing the importance of domain specific evaluation when deploying these techniques. Our results provide actionable guidance for selecting optimal inference strategies given specific domains and resource constraints. We open source our self-reflection implementation for reproducibility at https://github.com/aws-samples/sample-genai-reflection-for-bedrock.

ChemPile: A 250GB Diverse and Curated Dataset for Chemical Foundation Models

Foundation models have shown remarkable success across scientific domains, yet their impact in chemistry remains limited due to the absence of diverse, large-scale, high-quality datasets that reflect the field's multifaceted nature. We present the ChemPile, an open dataset containing over 75 billion tokens of curated chemical data, specifically built for training and evaluating general-purpose models in the chemical sciences. The dataset mirrors the human learning journey through chemistry -- from educational foundations to specialized expertise -- spanning multiple modalities and content types including structured data in diverse chemical representations (SMILES, SELFIES, IUPAC names, InChI, molecular renderings), scientific and educational text, executable code, and chemical images. ChemPile integrates foundational knowledge (textbooks, lecture notes), specialized expertise (scientific articles and language-interfaced data), visual understanding (molecular structures, diagrams), and advanced reasoning (problem-solving traces and code) -- mirroring how human chemists develop expertise through diverse learning materials and experiences. Constructed through hundreds of hours of expert curation, the ChemPile captures both foundational concepts and domain-specific complexity. We provide standardized training, validation, and test splits, enabling robust benchmarking. ChemPile is openly released via HuggingFace with a consistent API, permissive license, and detailed documentation. We hope the ChemPile will serve as a catalyst for chemical AI, enabling the development of the next generation of chemical foundation models.

PatentsView-Evaluation: Evaluation Datasets and Tools to Advance Research on Inventor Name Disambiguation

We present PatentsView-Evaluation, a Python package that enables researchers to evaluate the performance of inventor name disambiguation systems such as PatentsView.org. The package includes benchmark datasets and evaluation tools, and aims to advance research on inventor name disambiguation by providing access to high-quality evaluation data and improving evaluation standards.