Refining Over Resampling: Test-Time Self-Correction for LLM Reasoning

Abstract

Test-time scaling improves LLM reasoning by using additional inference compute, but wider sampling alone can suffer from diminishing returns: new rollouts often repeat existing answer patterns instead of adding useful reasoning diversity. Verifier-based selection offers an alternative, but its performance depends on the calibration of an external reward model. We propose a verifier-free breadth--depth refinement framework that uses test-time compute to both explore and improve candidate solutions. The method samples multiple independent reasoning rollouts, refines each rollout through iterative self-critique and self-correction, and aggregates the refined answers by majority voting. Breadth preserves diverse initial attempts, while depth repairs local reasoning errors before aggregation. Across AIME24, AIME25, AMC, OlympiadBench, and MATH500, our method consistently improves over greedy decoding, majority voting, verifier-based best-of-$N$, beam search, and lookahead decoding across multiple open-weight models. For instance, with Qwen2.5-1.5B, accuracy increases from the strongest verifier-based baseline to $58.0\%$ on MATH500, and from $25.0\%$ to $32.5\%$ on AMC. These results show that test-time compute can be more effective when used to refine sampled trajectories rather than only to sample more candidates or rely on verifier-guided selection.