{"id":1169863,"date":"2026-04-27T11:16:52","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T18:16:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/learning-to-refine-self-refinement-of-parallel-reasoning-in-llms\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T15:09:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T22:09:16","slug":"learning-to-refine-self-refinement-of-parallel-reasoning-in-llms","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/learning-to-refine-self-refinement-of-parallel-reasoning-in-llms\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning to Refine: Self-Refinement of Parallel Reasoning in LLMs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>To further enhance the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex, multi-step reasoning problems, test-time scaling (TTS) methods have gained widespread attention. Existing approaches such as Best-of-N and majority voting are limited as their performance depends on the quality of candidate responses, making them unable to produce a correct solution when all candidates are incorrect. Introducing an additional model to select the best response also incurs significant deployment costs. To this end, we introduce Generative Self-Refinement (GSR), a novel parallel test-time scaling framework where a unified model first generates a set of candidate responses in parallel and then performs self-refinement to synthesize a new superior solution based on a prompt consisting of the problem and these candidates. However, LLMs struggle to perform refinement effectively when prompted directly. Therefore, we design a hybrid training pipeline by jointly optimizing for two complementary objectives, solving problems directly and refining candidate responses. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across five mathematical benchmarks. We further show that this learned self-refinement skill is a model-agnostic enhancement, robust across different model scales and generalizing to out-of-distribution reasoning tasks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To further enhance the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex, multi-step reasoning problems, test-time scaling (TTS) methods have gained widespread attention. Existing approaches such as Best-of-N and majority voting are limited as their performance depends on the quality of candidate responses, making them unable to produce a correct solution when all candidates 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