In the news
Sample More, Reflect Less: Self-Refine and Reflexion Lose to Repeated Sampling at Equal Token Cost, from 1.5B to 7B
arXiv cs.AI · Published · 1 min read
In 30 seconds
- What happened
- A controlled experiment shows simple repeated sampling outperforms or matches self-refining methods like Self-Refine and Reflexion when token budgets are equal across 1.5B to 7B models.
- Why it matters
- Matters for engineers choosing inference strategies for math problems and evaluating whether complex reasoning methods justify their computational cost.
- Watch out
- Study limited to two math benchmarks with 150 questions each; results may not generalize to other domains, languages, or task types beyond mathematics.
- language model
- token
The patterns behind this
Each one covers how the technique works, when it earns its cost, and where it breaks.
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