For problems that require multi-step reasoning, standard LLMs seem to be stuck. The field is increasingly interested in models like o1 that output many "guesses" to find the right one. Currently open-source does not know how to do this, but we are reimplementing several possible directions to try. This replicates one important path using search and a verifier model.

To spend more compute at inference time, at least two simple approaches are readily available:

1) make model output a full solution, step-by-step, then induce it to revise the solution - repeat this as many times as you have token-budget for. You can do this via prompting alone (see Reflexion for example), or you can fine-tune the model to do that. The paper explores fine-tuning of the base model to turn it into self-revision model.

2) sample step-by-step (one "thought"-sentence per line) solutions from the model, and do it at non-zero temperature to be able to sample multiple next-steps. Then use verifier model to choose between next-step candidates and prefer to continue the rollout of the more promising branches of "thoughts". There are many many methods of exploring such tree when you can score intermediate nodes (beam search is an almost 50 years old algorithm!).

If I understand correctly, Hugging Face is exploring approaches to tuning the output quality of a given model by tuning how long to let it run.

Normally when you run an LLM, you set your prompt and whatever tunable parameters, and the LLM software (eg. lamma.cpp) spits out tokens at whatever rate it can. If you want higher quality, you run a bigger model (though you're limited by the amount of memory you have available). If you want higher speed, you run a smaller model. Hugging Face seems to be looking at ways to make this tradeoff without switching between different models.