Eleonora Giunchiglia
2026
PiCSAR: Probabilistic Confidence Selection and Ranking for Reasoning Chains
Joshua Ong Jun Leang | Zheng Zhao | Aryo Pradipta Gema | Sohee Yang | Wai-Chung Kwan | Xuanli He | Wenda Li | Pasquale Minervini | Eleonora Giunchiglia | Shay B Cohen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Joshua Ong Jun Leang | Zheng Zhao | Aryo Pradipta Gema | Sohee Yang | Wai-Chung Kwan | Xuanli He | Wenda Li | Pasquale Minervini | Eleonora Giunchiglia | Shay B Cohen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Best-of-n sampling improves the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) and large reasoning models (LRMs) by generating multiple candidate solutions and selecting the one with the highest reward. The key challenge for reasoning tasks is designing a scoring function that can identify correct reasoning chains without access to ground-truth answers. We propose Probabilistic Confidence Selection and Ranking for Reasoning Chains (PiCSAR): a simple, training-free method that scores each candidate generation using the joint log-likelihood of the reasoning and final answer. This method utilises both the scores of the reasoning path (*reasoning confidence*) and the final answer (*answer confidence*). PiCSAR achieves substantial gains across several benchmarks (+11.7 on AIME2024, +9.81 on AIME2025), outperforming baselines with at least 2x fewer samples in 20 out of 25 comparisons. Our analysis reveals that correct reasoning chains exhibit higher reasoning and answer confidence, justifying the effectiveness of PiCSAR.
2022
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP
Spandana Gella | He He | Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder | Burcu Can | Eleonora Giunchiglia | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Sewon Min | Maximilian Mozes | Xiang Lorraine Li | Isabelle Augenstein | Anna Rogers | Kyunghyun Cho | Edward Grefenstette | Laura Rimell | Chris Dyer
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP
Spandana Gella | He He | Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder | Burcu Can | Eleonora Giunchiglia | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Sewon Min | Maximilian Mozes | Xiang Lorraine Li | Isabelle Augenstein | Anna Rogers | Kyunghyun Cho | Edward Grefenstette | Laura Rimell | Chris Dyer
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP