Cross Domain Test Time Scaling: Scale Knowledge and Reasoning on Cross Domains
Cross Domain Test Time Scaling: Scale Knowledge and Reasoning on Cross Domains
Minxi Yan, Yihua Shao, Yanling Pan, Siyu Chen, Hongjuan Pei, Hao Tang, Fei Ma, Jingcai Guo, Nicu Sebe
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1947-1955.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/217
Test-time scaling (TTS) has demonstrated remarkable potential in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, its application has primarily been limited to domains such as mathematics and programming, owing to their reasoning-intensive nature and the ease of result verification. Its utility in other knowledge-intensive fields, such as medicine and general scientific research, remains underexplored.
To bridge this gap and unlock the potential of TTS in broader domains, we propose Cross-Domain TTS, a novel framework that enables task-tailored scaling. This framework consists of two key components: a conformal prediction-based cold-start strategy and an information-gain-based dynamic reasoning adjustment. The CP-based cold-start strategy guides the model's initialization during test-time scaling based on conformal prediction theory, while the information-gain-based dynamic reasoning adjustment guides the model's reasoning progress through a progress vector according to the information gain of reasoning steps. We conducted experiments using LLMs and LVLMs on cross-domain benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently improves performance across various domain-specific datasets. For instance, in the medical domain, it achieves an improvement of up to 17% in pass@1 accuracy while reducing inference latency and saving up to 30% in token consumption. Code is available at https://github.com/Yan0613/Cross-Domain-TTS.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: Transfer, low-shot, semi- and un- supervised learning
Machine Learning: Cost-sensitive learning
Machine Learning: Foundation models
Machine Learning: Learning sparse models
Machine Learning: Open-World/Open-Set/OOD Learning
