Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly smaller variants, still struggle with complex reasoning tasks. While inference-time prompting can guide reasoning, existing methods often rely on sequential queries. Ensemble approaches offer a promising path to performance gains, especially given recent batch inference speed-ups. This work introduces DIPPER, a novel, training-free framework that transforms a single LLM into an effective inference-time ensemble. By feeding the model an optimized and diverse set of prompts in parallel, DIPPER elicits varied reasoning paths, leading to performance gains. We empirically demonstrate significant improvements on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, such as MATH, where a DIPPER ensemble of three Qwen2-MATH-1.5B instances (via parallel prompting of a single model) outperforms a larger Qwen2-MATH-7B model.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are large-scale pretrained models that have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains. These successes have been driven by unprecedented complexity and scale in both data and computations. However, due to the high costs of training such models, brute-force trial-and-error approaches to improve LLMs are not feasible. Inspired by the success of inverse problems in uncovering fundamental scientific laws, this position paper advocates that inverse problems can also efficiently uncover scaling laws that guide the building of LLMs to achieve the desirable performance with significantly better cost-effectiveness.

This position paper proposes a data-centric viewpoint of AI research, focusing on large language models (LLMs). We start by making a key observation that data is instrumental in the developmental (e.g., pretraining and fine-tuning) and inferential stages (e.g., in-context learning) of LLMs, and advocate that data-centric research should receive more attention from the community. We identify four specific scenarios centered around data, covering data-centric benchmarks and data curation, data attribution, knowledge transfer, and inference contextualization. In each scenario, we underscore the importance of data, highlight promising research directions, and articulate the potential impacts on the research community and, where applicable, the society as a whole. For instance, we advocate for a suite of data-centric benchmarks tailored to the scale and complexity of data for LLMs. These benchmarks can be used to develop new data curation methods and document research efforts and results, which can help promote openness and transparency in AI and LLM research.