Self-Consistency Is Losing Its Edge: Diminishing Returns and Rising Costs in Modern LLMs

ArXi:2511.00751v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Self-consistency -- sampling multiple reasoning paths and selecting the most frequent answer -- was designed for an era when language models made frequent, unpredictable errors. This study argues that the technique has become increasingly wasteful as models grow stronger, and may degrade performance on problems that modern models already solve reliably.