Ruizhong Qiu


2026

Different large language models (LLMs) exhibit diverse strengths and weaknesses, and LLM ensemble serves as a promising approach to integrate their complementary capabilities. Despite substantial progress in improving ensemble quality, limited attention has been paid to the robustness of ensembles against potential erroneous signals, which often arise from heterogeneous tokenization schemes and varying model expertise. Our analysis shows that ensemble failures typically arise from both the token level and the model level: the former reflects severe disagreement in token predictions, while the latter involves low confidence and pronounced disparities among models. In light of this, we propose CoRE, a plug-and-play technique that harnesses model consistency for robust LLM ensemble, which can be seamlessly integrated with diverse ensemble methods. *Token-level consistency* captures fine-grained disagreements by applying a low-pass filter to downweight uncertain tokens with high inconsistency, often due to token misalignment, thereby improving robustness at a granular level. *Model-level consistency* models global agreement by promoting model outputs with high self-confidence and minimal divergence from others, enhancing robustness at a coarser level. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks, model combinations, and ensemble strategies demonstrate that CoRE consistently improves ensemble performance and robustness. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhichenz98/CoRE-EACL26.
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, methods such as GRPO and DAPO suffer from substantial computational cost, since they rely on sampling many rollouts for each prompt. Moreover, in RLVR the relative advantage is often sparse: many samples become nearly all-correct or all-incorrect, yielding low within-group reward variance and thus weak learning signals. In this paper, we introduce ARRoL (**A**ccelerating **R**LV**R** via **o**nline Ro**L**lout Pruning), an online rollout pruning method that prunes rollouts during generation while explicitly steering the surviving ones more correctness-balanced to enhance learning signals. Specifically, ARRoL trains a lightweight quality head on-the-fly to predict the success probability of partial rollouts and uses it to make early pruning decisions. The learned quality head can further weigh candidates to improve inference accuracy during test-time voting. To improve efficiency, we present a system design that prunes rollouts inside the inference engine and re-batches the remaining ones for log-probability computation and policy updates. Across GRPO and DAPO on Qwen-3 and LLaMA-3.2 models (1B-8B), ARRoL improves average accuracy by +2.30 to +2.99 while achieving up to 1.7× training speedup, and yielding up to +8.33 additional gains in average accuracy in test-time voting.
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit complementary strengths arising from differences in pretraining data, model architectures, and decoding behaviors. Inference-time ensembling provides a practical way to combine these capabilities without retraining. However, existing ensemble approaches suffer from fundamental limitations. Most rely on fixed fusion granularity, which lacks the flexibility required for mid-generation adaptation and fails to adapt to different generation characteristics across tasks. To address these challenges, we propose AdaFuse, an adaptive ensemble decoding framework that dynamically selects semantically appropriate fusion units during generation. Rather than committing to a fixed granularity, AdaFuse adjusts fusion behavior on the fly based on the decoding context, with words serving as basic building blocks for alignment. To be specific, we introduce an uncertainty-based criterion to decide whether to apply ensembling at each decoding step. Under confident decoding states, the model continues generation directly. In less certain states, AdaFuse invokes a diversity-aware scaling strategy to explore alternative candidate continuations and inform ensemble decisions. This design establishes a synergistic interaction between adaptive ensembling and test-time scaling, where ensemble decisions guide targeted exploration, and the resulting diversity in turn strengthens ensemble quality. Experiments on open-domain QA, arithmetic reasoning, and machine translation demonstrate that AdaFuse consistently outperforms strong ensemble baselines, achieving an average relative improvement of 6.88%.