arXiv Machine Learning

Verbalized Particle Posterior: Bayesian Inference over Natural Language Hypotheses

arXiv:2607. 22961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Verbalized Machine Learning (VML) parameterizes a model as a natural-language prompt that an LLM evaluates as f(x; theta).

arXiv AI
Sep 3

Induction and Inquiry via Probabilistic Reasoning over Language and Code

The paper introduces a computational model that encodes symbolic knowledge as mental programs combining natural language and source code, and uses LLM-guided Bayesian learning to sequentially infer these programs. It demonstrates that this approach satisfies data‑efficiency, uncertainty handling, and flexibility, reproducing human inductive learning and active inquiry behaviors such as anchoring and garden‑pathing. In contrast, pure LLMs and classic Bayesian models either fail the task, do not match human behavior, or require prohibitive computational resources.

By Wasu Top Piriyakulkij, Sam Acquaviva, Cassidy Langenfeld, Joshua Tenenbaum, Kevin Ellis
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

Structured Inference with Large Language Gibbs

arXiv:2606. 19264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs) can serve as a substrate for structured reasoning over variables describing a complex world, but accessing this knowledge in a probabilistically coherent manner poses a difficult inference problem.

By Sanghyeok Choi, Henry Gouk, Esmeralda S. Whitammer
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Unifying ICL, SFT, KL-Regularized RL Through a Bayesian Lens

The paper presents a Bayesian framework that unifies several large‑language‑model training and evaluation paradigms—supervised fine‑tuning (SFT), few‑shot in‑context learning (ICL), and KL‑regularized reinforcement learning (RLHF/RLVR). It shows that each method can be viewed as a two‑step process: first constructing a Bayes or Gibbs posterior over outputs or actions using a prior and a utility signal, then approximating this posterior via a forward‑KL projection onto a parametric family. The authors formalize ICL and SFT as amortized weight projections, and demonstrate that reward‑weighted SFT, reward‑weighted ICL, and advantage‑weighted SFT are all special cases of forward‑KL projection onto reward‑induced posteriors, while also outlining where these equivalences hold and where they break down.

By Junxin Fan
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 18

BayesPrompt: human readable prompts that make sense

BayesPrompt proposes a Bayesian approach to prompt optimisation for large language models, aiming to generate prompts that are both efficient in perplexity and human readable. The authors argue that traditional optimisation methods produce unintelligible pseudoprompts due to the ill‑posed nature of the task. Their algorithm samples prompts from a posterior distribution, and experiments on real data show marked improvements over state‑of‑the‑art alternatives across several metrics.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 1

Off-the-Shelf LLMs as Process Scorers: Training-Free Alternative to PRMs for Mathematical Reasoning

Selecting the best response from multiple small-model samples using a stronger scorer is a simple inference-time strategy, but fails when the small model has already committed to incorrect reasoning paths. PRM guided search avoids this by scoring candidate continuations during generation, but requires a reward model trained with step-level labels.