Ranking Reasoning LLMs under Test-Time Scaling
About
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 $20$ reasoning models on four Olympiad-style math benchmarks (AIME'24, AIME'25, HMMT'25, and BrUMO'25; up to $N=80$ trials), most full-trial rankings agree closely with the Bayesian gold standard $\mathrm{Bayes}_{\mathcal{U}}@80$ (mean Kendall's $\tau_b = 0.93$--$0.95$), and $19$--$34$ methods recover exactly the same ordering. In the single-trial regime, the best methods reach $\tau_b \approx 0.86$. Using greedy decoding as an empirical prior ($\mathrm{Bayes}_{\mathbf{R}_0}@N$) reduces variance at $N=1$ by $16$--$52\%$, 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.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gold-standard ranking agreement | combined benchmark | -- | 36 | |
| Method ranking self-consistency | Combined benchmark M=120 questions | -- | 30 | |
| Ranking Correlation Analysis | AIME 24 | Kendall's tau_b (vs. Gold)0.779 | 1 | |
| Ranking Correlation Analysis | AIME 25 | Kendall's tau_b (vs Gold Standard)0.798 | 1 | |
| Ranking Correlation Analysis | Brumo 25 | Kendall's tau_b (vs. Gold Standard)0.858 | 1 | |
| Ranking Correlation Analysis | Combined AIME'24 AIME'25 HMMT'25 BrUMO'25 | -- | 1 | |
| Ranking Method Evaluation | AIME 24 | -- | 1 | |
| Ranking Method Evaluation | AIME 25 | -- | 1 | |
| Ranking Method Evaluation | Brumo 25 | -- | 1 | |
| Ranking Method Evaluation | Combined AIME'24 AIME'25 HMMT'25 BrUMO'25 | -- | 1 |