Inference Scaling Laws: An Empirical Analysis of Compute-Optimal Inference for LLM Problem-Solving

While the scaling laws of large language models (LLMs) training have been extensively studied, optimal inference configurations of LLMs remain underexplored. We study inference scaling laws and compute-optimal inference, focusing on the trade-offs between model sizes and generating additional tokens with different inference strategies. As a first step towards understanding and designing compute-optimal inference methods, we studied cost-performance trade-offs for inference strategies such as greedy search, majority voting, best-of-$n$, weighted voting, and two different tree search algorithms, using different model sizes and compute budgets. Our findings indicate smaller models (e.g., Llemma-7B) can outperform larger models given the same computation budgets, and that smaller models paired with advanced inference algorithms yield Pareto-optimal cost-performance trade-offs. For instance, the Llemma-7B model, equipped with our novel tree search algorithm, consistently outperforms Llemma-34B with standard majority voting on the MATH benchmark across all FLOPs budgets. We hope these findings contribute to a broader understanding of inference scaling laws for LLMs.