Abstract
While scaling test-time compute can substantially improve model performance, existing approaches either rely on static compute allocation or sample from fixed generation distributions.In this work, we introduce a test-time compute allocation framework that jointly adapts where computation is spent and how generation is performed. Our method begins with a warm-up phase that identifies easy queries and assembles an initial pool of question-response pairs from the test set itself. An adaptive phase then concentrates further computation on unresolved queries while reshaping their generation distributions through evolving in-context demonstrations—conditioning each generation on successful responses from semantically related queries rather than resampling from a fixed distribution.Experiments across math, coding, and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines while consuming substantially less inference-time compute.
- Anthology ID:
- 2026.findings-acl.1754
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 35156–35173
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1754/
- DOI:
- Bibkey:
- Cite (ACL):
- Bowen Zuo, Dongruo Zhou, and Yinglun Zhu. 2026. Adaptive Test-Time Compute Allocation with Evolving In-Context Demonstrations. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 35156–35173, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Adaptive Test-Time Compute Allocation with Evolving In-Context Demonstrations (Zuo et al., Findings 2026)
- Copy Citation:
- PDF:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1754.pdf
- Checklist:
- 2026.findings-acl.1754.checklist.pdf





















