Estimating the Self-Consistency of LLMs

Robert Nowak

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arXiv · 2509.19489

Estimating the Self-Consistency of LLMs

Robert Nowak

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Abstract

Systems often repeat the same prompt to large language models (LLMs) and aggregate responses to improve reliability. This short note analyzes an estimator of the self-consistency of LLMs and the tradeoffs it induces under a fixed compute budget $B=mn$, where $m$ is the number of prompts sampled from the task distribution and $n$ is the number of repeated LLM calls per prompt; the resulting analysis favors a rough split $m,n\propto\sqrt{B}$.

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Robert Nowak. 2025-09-23. Estimating the Self-Consistency of LLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19489

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