Tingxin Yang

Author directory

2026

Test-time scaling improves large language model reasoning, but spends compute uniformly along a reasoning trace, even in stretches that are already stable. Motivated by the observation that reasoning failures show an early onset of uncertainty, we introduce DeepLook, a training-free decoding framework that monitors segment-level confidence, branches only at uncertainty bottlenecks, and ranks candidate continuations by Average Lookahead Confidence (ALC)—their mean confidence over fixed-horizon rollouts—before completing and voting over a pruned subset. On four competition mathematics benchmarks across four open models, DeepLook matches or exceeds the accuracy of DeepConf-low in 12 of 16 settings while generating 87.3% fewer tokens, showing that a model’s own confidence is informative enough to decide where extra decoding compute is worth spending. On knowledge-intensive GPQA-Diamond the accuracy advantage disappears even though the token saving does not: coherent hallucinations also receive high ALC, so internal confidence localizes instability, not falsehood. Code will be released upon acceptance.