{"id":1172640,"date":"2026-05-19T21:19:40","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T04:19:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=1172640"},"modified":"2026-05-19T21:50:27","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T04:50:27","slug":"pat-planning-after-trial-for-efficient-test-time-code-generation","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/pat-planning-after-trial-for-efficient-test-time-code-generation\/","title":{"rendered":"PaT: Planning-after-Trial for Efficient Test-Time Code Generation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Beyond training-time optimization, scaling test-time computation has emerged as a key paradigm to extend the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, most existing methods adopt a rigid Planning-before-Trial (PbT) policy, which inefficiently allocates test-time compute by incurring planning overhead even on directly solvable problems. We propose Planning-after-Trial (PaT), an adaptive policy for code generation that invokes a planner only upon verification failure. This adaptive policy naturally enables a heterogeneous model configuration: a cost-efficient model handles generation attempts, while a powerful model is reserved for targeted planning interventions. Empirically, across multiple benchmarks and model families, our approach significantly advances the cost-performance Pareto frontier. Notably, our heterogeneous configuration achieves performance comparable to a large homogeneous model while reducing inference cost by approximately 69%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beyond training-time optimization, scaling test-time computation has emerged as a key paradigm to extend the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, most existing methods adopt a rigid Planning-before-Trial (PbT) policy, which inefficiently allocates test-time compute by incurring planning overhead even on directly solvable problems. We propose Planning-after-Trial (PaT), an adaptive policy for code […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Main 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