@inproceedings{khairi-etal-2025-life,
    title = "When Life Gives You Samples: The Benefits of Scaling up Inference Compute for Multilingual {LLM}s",
    author = "Khairi, Ammar  and
      D{'}souza, Daniel  and
      Shen, Ye  and
      Kreutzer, Julia  and
      Hooker, Sara",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1402/",
    pages = "27547--27571",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shifted focus toward scaling inference-time compute{---}improving performance without retraining the model. A common approach is to sample multiple outputs in parallel, and select one of these as the final output. While existing work has focused on English and specific domains, we study how to robustly scale inference-time compute in a multilingual, multi-task setting: spanning open-ended generations, math and translation tasks, for open models at 8B and 111B scale, across seven languages. Our findings highlight the need for tailored sampling and selection strategies. We propose novel solutions tailored for this multi-faceted inference scenario, demonstrating notable gains across languages and tasks. Our methods achieve an average +6.8 jump in win-rates for 8B models on m-ArenaHard-v2.0 prompts in non-English languages against proprietary models like Gemini. At larger scale, our 111B model shows a +9.0 improvement with just five samples compared to single-sample decoding. These results emphasize the importance of language- and task-aware approaches to democratize inference-time improvements."
}