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arXiv · 2603.10960

Ranking Reasoning LLMs under Test-Time Scaling

Mohsen Hariri·Michael Hinczewski·Jing Ma·Vipin Chaudhary
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Abstract

Test-time scaling evaluates reasoning LLMs by sampling multiple outputs per prompt, but ranking models in this regime remains underexplored. We formalize dense benchmark ranking under test-time scaling and introduce Scorio, a library that implements statistical ranking methods such as paired-comparison models, item response theory (IRT) models, voting rules, and graph- and spectral-based methods. Across $20$ reasoning models on four Olympiad-style math benchmarks (AIME'24, AIME'25, HMMT'25, and BrUMO'25; up to $N=80$ trials), most full-trial rankings agree closely with the Bayesian gold standard $\mathrm{Bayes}_{\mathcal{U}}@80$ (mean Kendall's $\tau_b = 0.93$--$0.95$), and $19$--$34$ methods recover exactly the same ordering. In the single-trial regime, the best methods reach $\tau_b \approx 0.86$. Using greedy decoding as an empirical prior ($\mathrm{Bayes}_{\mathbf{R}_0}@N$) reduces variance at $N=1$ by $16$--$52\%$, but can bias rankings when greedy and stochastic sampling disagree. These results identify reliable ranking methods for both high- and low-budget test-time scaling. We release Scorio as an open-source library at https://github.com/mohsenhariri/scorio.

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BibTeXRIS

Mohsen Hariri, Michael Hinczewski, Jing Ma, Vipin Chaudhary. 2026-03-11. Ranking Reasoning LLMs under Test-Time Scaling. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10960

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