The Sequential Edge: Inverse-Entropy Voting Beats Parallel
  Self-Consistency at Matched Compute
Authors: name: Aman Sharma; name: Paras Chopra
Published: 2025-11-04 06:48:34

Abstract: We revisit test-time scaling for language model reasoning and ask a
fundamental question: at equal token budget and compute, is it better to run
multiple independent chains in parallel, or to run fewer chains that
iteratively refine through sequential steps? Through comprehensive evaluation
across 5 state-of-the-art open source models and 3 challenging reasoning
benchmarks, we find that sequential scaling where chains explicitly build upon
previous attempts consistently outperforms the dominant parallel
self-consistency paradigm in 95.6% of configurations with gains in accuracy
upto 46.7%. Further, we introduce inverse-entropy weighted voting, a novel
training-free method to further boost the accuracy of sequential scaling. By
weighing answers in proportion to the inverse entropy of their reasoning
chains, we increase our success rate over parallel majority and establish it as
the optimal test-time scaling strategy. Our findings fundamentally challenge
the parallel reasoning orthodoxy that has dominated test-time scaling since
Wang et al.'s self-consistency decoding (Wang et al., 2022), positioning
sequential refinement as the robust default for modern LLM reasoning and
necessitating a paradigm shift in how we approach inference-time optimization.