arXiv:2609.38104v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Power-sharpened sampling is an inference-time alternative to reinforcement-learning (RL) post-training for enhancing reasoning in large language models...
By Panagiotis Theodoropoulos, Nan Jiang, Xintong Duan, Ali Hasan, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Evangelos A. Theodorou, Wei Deng
arXiv:2608. 03961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling improves LLM reasoning by generating and aggregating multiple candidate answers, yet many pipelines use fixed per-query budgets that spend the same compute on easy and difficult prompts.
By Mobina Kashaniyan, Ali Jannesari
Chopthin-Consensus Power Sampling (CCPS) is a new inference-time decoding method for large language models that uses the Chopthin resampler to preserve diversity among particle trajectories. By enforcing an upper bound on weight ratios instead of equal-weight resampling, CCPS maintains a richer set of distinct reasoning paths and guarantees a lower bound on effective sample size. Coupled with a semantic-majority selection mechanism, CCPS achieves higher oracle coverage and matches or surpasses baseline accuracy on multiple reasoning benchmarks.
By Minoo Ahmadi, Seyedarmin Azizi, Erfan Baghaei Potraghloo, Mehdi Kamal, Massoud Pedram
Power‑SMC is a training‑free sampling method that targets the sequence‑level power distribution used to sharpen large language model outputs for reasoning tasks. It maintains multiple candidate sequences, assigns importance weights based on how well each matches the power distribution, and periodically prunes low‑scoring candidates to keep inference latency close to standard decoding. Experiments on MATH500, GSM8K, GPQA, and HumanEval show that Power‑SMC matches or surpasses Metropolis–Hastings sampling in accuracy, preserves output diversity, and can accelerate inference speed by up to 17.6×.
By Seyedarmin Azizi, Erfan Baghaei Potraghloo, Minoo Ahmadi, Souvik Kundu, Massoud Pedram
arXiv:2608. 14420v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Power Sampling sharpens a language model's distribution over complete generation trajectories, offering a verifier-free way to improve reasoning at inference time.
By Haohui Yang, Jiaxing Sun, Xiujun Ma
arXiv:2510. 18814v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Can language models improve their reasoning performance without external rewards, using only their own sampled responses for training?
By Mengqi Li, Lei Zhao, Anthony Man-Cho So, Ruoyu Sun, Xiao Li
The paper surveys efficient reasoning in large language models, contrasting fast intuitive (System 1) and slow deep (System 2) reasoning. It analyzes why System 2 is computationally costly yet more accurate, and why System 1 is efficient but less effective. The survey covers causes of inefficiency, patterns of reasoning behavior, and potential solutions to balance performance and computational budgets, offering actionable insights and an open‑source repository for ongoing research.
By Rui Wang, Hongru Wang, Boyang Xue, Jianhui Pang, Shudong Liu, Yi Chen, Jiahao Qiu, Derek Fai Wong, Heng Ji, Kam-Fai Wong
arXiv:2608. 05643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling improves LLM reasoning by using additional inference compute, but wider sampling alone can suffer from diminishing returns: new rollouts often repeat existing answer patterns instead of adding useful reasoning diversity.
By Ahsan Bilal, Muhammad Ahmed Mohsin, Muhammad Umer, Lena Trigg, Ali Subhan, Muhammad Ali, Dean F. Hougen
AdaR is a framework designed to enhance large language models (LLMs) with adaptive reasoning for mathematical tasks. It identifies and mitigates spurious reasoning—where models rely on superficial correlations—by generating logically equivalent queries and training with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to penalize incorrect logic and promote adaptive logic. The approach includes extracting problem‑solving logic, executing code to verify answers, and applying sanity checks, resulting in significant gains in mathematical reasoning performance and improved data efficiency.
By Zhejian Lai, Xiang Geng, Zhijun Wang, Yang Bai, Jiahuan Li, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Shujian Huang
The paper introduces a new reward, GRPO, that encourages large reasoning models (LRMs) to efficiently determine whether a task is solvable before generating a full chain of thought. Fine‑tuning 4B LRMs with this reward improves their ability to abstain from answering unanswerable prompts by an average of 12.8% while producing 44% shorter chains of thought. The approach also preserves the models’ overall answering performance.
By Polina Tsvilodub, Max H\"oth, Michael Franke, Bj\"orn Deiseroth, Carina Kauf
Goldilocks RL proposes an adaptive data‑selection strategy for reinforcement learning in language models, using a Selector network to predict reward variability and prioritize questions that are neither too easy nor too hard. By continuously adapting to the model’s evolving abilities, Goldilocks improves training efficiency on large‑scale reasoning datasets, achieving up to 78% fewer optimization steps compared to standard GRPO. The approach addresses the sample‑inefficiency problem of sparse rewards in reasoning tasks.
By Ilia Mahrooghi, Aryo Lotfi, Emmanuel Abbe
ReSolve is a training‑free inference method that reuses candidate reasoning by selectively moderating generative outputs. It examines existing derivations when candidates disagree or lack a parseable answer, then incorporates new solutions into a bounded loop. On 130 competition‑mathematics problems, ReSolve achieves 100 and 99 correct answers with significantly fewer tokens than eight‑sample self‑consistency, while a controlled ablation shows that visible derivations improve accuracy.
By Bangji Yang, Jiajun Fan, Hongba Ma, Xi Zhu, Weizhi Zhang, Minghao Guo, Ye Li, Hamid Palangi, Jiaxuan You