Test-time scaling has emerged as a transformative paradigm for enhancing the performance of large reasoning models, enabling dynamic allocation of computational resources during inference. However, as the landscape of reasoning models rapidly expands, a critical question remains: how can we systematically compare and evaluate the test-time scaling capabilities across different models? In this paper, we introduce ARISE (Adaptive Resolution-aware Scaling Evaluation), a novel metric specifically designed to assess the test-time scaling effectiveness of large reasoning models. Unlike existing evaluation approaches, ARISE incorporates two key innovations: (1) sample-level awareness that effectively penalizes negative scaling behaviors where increased computation leads to performance degradation, and (2) a dynamic sampling mechanism that mitigates the impact of accuracy fluctuations and token count instability on the final assessment. We conduct comprehensive experiments evaluating state-of-the-art reasoning models across diverse domains including mathematical reasoning, code generation, and agentic tasks. Our results demonstrate that ARISE provides a reliable and fine-grained measurement of test-time scaling capabilities, revealing significant variations in scaling efficiency across models. Notably, our evaluation identifies Claude Opus as exhibiting superior scaling characteristics compared to other contemporary reasoning models.

Improving the exploration of reasoning is essential for advancing Large Language Models’ (LLMs) problem-solving performance. Current methods primarily rely on output-level stochasticity, which decode within fixed reasoning patterns of LLM and suffer from insufficient exploration. In this paper, we introduce adjusting attention temperature to directly modulate the model’s internal focus during reasoning, which enables a dynamic shift between exploratory and focused processing. We reveal that moderate adjustments preserve LLM’s reasoning capability while producing problem hardness-dependent benefits: higher temperatures facilitate solving complex tasks by encouraging wider exploration, whereas lower temperatures mitigate overthinking on simpler problems. Leveraging this insight, we propose a two-stage inference strategy: first, attention temperature scaling modulates the LLM’s reasoning patterns to diversify the reasoning traces; then, a difficulty-aware aggregation scheme is introduced to effectively identify the most reliable solution from the generated candidates. Extensive evaluations show that our method improves Pass@10 by 6.78–14.20% and aggregation accuracy by 9.74% across 7 reasoning benchmarks.