Stop Paying the Worst Case on Every Query: Adaptive Test-Time Compute

Best-of-N spends the same reasoning budget on trivial and brutal questions alike. A difficulty gate plus a verifier concentrates compute on the queries that need it — same accuracy, a fraction of the cost. TL;DR: The standard way to buy accuracy at inference — best-of-N , sample N reasoning attempts and pick the best — is flat-rate. It burns the full budget on a trivial query and still under-serves a brutal one. Adaptive test-time compute allocates instead: a cheap gate estimates difficulty and…