Aspect-wise Pairwise Tournaments for Test-Time Selection

arXiv:2611.08640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling test-time compute has proven highly effective at improving LLM reasoning. A popular method is best-of-n sampling, where a model generates many candidate solutions and one is selected. This motivates the question: how can we select the best candidate? When humans make choices, we find it more natural to compare two options than judge each in isolation. Additionally, when the options become complex, we like to judge the options one aspect at a time, such as comparing two job candidates on experience, communication, etc. In the test-time setting, candidate solutions should be judged in the same way. Here we introduce Aspect-wise Pairwise Tournaments (APT), which verifies by comparison and compares by aspect.