Anirudh Satheesh


2026

With Large Language Models (LLMs) rapidly approaching and potentially surpassing human-level performance, it has become imperative to develop approaches capable of effectively supervising and enhancing these powerful models using smaller, human-level models exposed to only human-level data. We address this critical weak-to-strong (W2S) generalization challenge by proposing a novel method aimed at improving weak experts, by training on the same limited human-level data, enabling them to generalize to complex, super-human-level tasks. Our approach, called EnsemW2S, employs a token-level ensemble strategy that iteratively combines multiple weak experts, systematically addressing the shortcomings identified in preceding iterations. By continuously refining these weak models, we significantly enhance their collective ability to supervise stronger student models. We extensively evaluate the generalization performance of both the ensemble of weak experts and the subsequent strong student model across in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets. For OOD, we specifically introduce question difficulty as an additional dimension for defining distributional shifts. Our empirical results demonstrate notable improvements, achieving 4%, and 3.2% improvements on ID datasets and, upto 6% and 2.28% on OOD datasets for experts and student models respectively, underscoring the effectiveness of our proposed method in advancing W2S generalization.

2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities, yet selecting the most reliable response from multiple LLMs remains a challenge, particularly in resource-constrained settings. Existing approaches often depend on costly external verifiers, human evaluators, or self-consistency techniques that require multiple samples from a single model. While multi-LLM systems produce more diverse responses than single models and thus have greater potential, they often underperform compared to single LLM self-consistency. In this work, we propose a calibrated log-likelihood-based selection framework to improve multi-LLM performance. Our approach leverages uncertainty estimation to identify the most confident response while minimizing inference costs. We show that our method outperforms majority voting and exceeds self-consistency performance when using a large number of model calls. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate improvements of approx. 4%, 3%, and 5% on GSM8K, MMLU, and ARC, respectively, when applying uncertainty-aware selection to multi-LLM systems.