Xi Xiong
Author directory2026
Batch-of-Thought: Cross-Instance Learning for Enhanced LLM Reasoning
Xuan Yang | Furong Jia | Roy Xie | Xi Xiong | Hengwei Bian | Jian LI | Monica Agrawal
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xuan Yang | Furong Jia | Roy Xie | Xi Xiong | Hengwei Bian | Jian LI | Monica Agrawal
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Current Large Language Model reasoning systems process queries independently, discarding valuable cross-instance signals such as shared reasoning patterns and consistency constraints. We introduce Batch-of-Thought (BoT), a training-free method that processes related queries jointly to enable cross-instance learning. By performing comparative analysis across queries, BoT identifies high-quality reasoning templates, detects errors through consistency checks, and amortizes computational costs. We instantiate BoT within a multi-agent reflection architecture (BoT-R), where a Reflector performs joint evaluation to unlock mutual information gain unavailable in isolated processing. Experiments across three model families and six benchmarks demonstrate that BoT-R consistently improves accuracy and confidence calibration while reducing inference costs by up to 61%. Our theoretical and experimental analysis reveals when and why batch-aware reasoning benefits LLM systems.