Ranking Reasoning LLMs under Test-Time Scaling
Mohsen Hariri, Michael Hinczewski, Jing Ma, Vipin Chaudhary
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 reasoning models on four Olympiad-style math benchmarks (AIME'24, AIME'25, HMMT'25, and BrUMO'25; up to trials), most full-trial rankings agree closely with the Bayesian gold standard (mean Kendall's --), and -- methods recover exactly the same ordering. In the single-trial regime, the best methods reach . Using greedy decoding as an empirical prior () reduces variance at by --, 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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