Jayita Bhattacharyya

Enabling LLMs to enhance their outputs through increased test-time computation is a crucial step toward building self-improving agents capable of handling open-ended natural language tasks. This session explores how allowing a fixed but non-trivial amount of inference-time compute can impact performance on challenging prompts—an area with significant implications for LLM pretraining strategies and the trade-offs between inference-time and pretraining compute.

Reasoning-focused LLMs, particularly open-source ones, are now challenging closed models with comparable performance using less compute. We’ll explore the mechanisms behind this shift, including Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and reinforcement learning-based reward modeling.

The session will cover the architectures, benchmarks, and performance of next-gen reasoning models through hands-on code walkthroughs. Topics include foundational LLM architectures (pre/post-training and inference), zero-shot CoT prompting (without RL), RL-based reasoning enhancements (beam search, Best-of-N, lookahead), and a comparison of fine-tuning strategies Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and Generalized Rejection-based Preference Optimization (GRPO)). Finally, we'll demonstrate how to run and fine-tune models efficiently using the Unsloth.ai framework on limited compute setups.