Zhi Zheng

This survey defines parallel reasoning as a three-stage inference paradigm of decomposition, parallel processing, and aggregation, gives a formal formulation and distinguishes it from Chain-of-Thought and long-thinking, then organizes representative methods along three lines—non-interactive (self-consistency, Best-of-N ranking, structured reasoning), interactive (intra-model and multi-agent interaction), and efficiency (parallel decoding, parallel function calling, speculative decoding)—and summarizes applications, core challenges, and future directions.

This survey defines parallel reasoning as a three-stage inference paradigm of decomposition, parallel processing, and aggregation, gives a formal formulation and distinguishes it from Chain-of-Thought and long-thinking, then organizes representative methods along three lines—non-interactive (self-consistency, Best-of-N ranking, structured reasoning), interactive (intra-model and multi-agent interaction), and efficiency (parallel decoding, parallel function calling, speculative decoding)—and summarizes applications, core challenges, and future directions.