The paper introduces Decision-Flow Sampling (DF‑Sample), a training‑free, data‑free inference framework that builds a hierarchical reasoning tree, evaluates entire trajectories, and back‑propagates utilities to guide branching decisions. Unlike local step‑wise sampling, DF‑Sample explicitly assesses global paths, enabling it to recover high‑quality, low‑probability reasoning chains that standard decoding misses. On the GPQA benchmark, DF‑Sample attains 45.6% accuracy, outperforming power sampling (38.9%) and GRPO (39.9%) and consistently surpassing baselines across multiple models and benchmarks, demonstrating significant latent reasoning potential in pretrained LLMs.
By Zhendong Mi, Shaoyi Huang
The paper investigates Evolution Strategies (ES) as a memory‑efficient post‑training method for large language model (LLM) reasoning. It demonstrates that ES outperforms Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) by achieving broader reasoning coverage, improving Pass@K metrics, and avoiding entropy collapse. The study also reveals that ES’s performance gains stem from sparse, high‑magnitude parameter updates, do not cause catastrophic forgetting, and can be combined with GRPO in a sequential training strategy.
By Yunpeng Ba, Zhi Zheng, Yue Xie, Jiaqing Li, Xialiang Tong, Tao Zhong, Mingxuan Yuan, Zhichao Lu, Xuyang Wu, Zhenkun Wang
arXiv:2606. 16222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on intermediate reasoning, yet explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) suffers from a linguistic space bottleneck: each thought must be decoded into tokens, causing high inference overhead.
By Xiandong Zou, Jing Huang, Jianshu Li, Pan Zhou
arXiv:2607. 26862v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a standard reinforcement learning method for post-training language models.
By Junoh Park, Junseo Hwang, Wonguk Cho, Taesup Kim
The paper introduces POISE, a reinforcement learning algorithm that uses a model’s internal states as a value estimator to reduce variance in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). By employing a lightweight probe that reads internal signals during the forward pass, POISE predicts baselines online and uses a cross‑rollout construction to keep gradients unbiased. Experiments on Qwen3‑4B and OLMo3‑7B‑Instruct‑DPO across six domains show POISE outperforms existing RLVR baselines, offering more stable training and a value model that generalizes across tasks and scales with the policy.
By Yunho Choi, Jongwon Lim, Woojin Ahn, Minjae Oh, Jeonghoon Shim, Yohan Jo
arXiv:2604. 17892v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recently, latent reasoning has been introduced into large language models (LLMs) to leverage rich information within a continuous space.
By Yuyan Zhou, Jiarui Yu, Hande Dong, Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Jianqing Zhang, Qiang Lin
arXiv:2608. 02585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimization-based latent reasoning improves large language model outputs by optimizing instance-specific continuous states at test time while keeping model parameters frozen.
By Zhaoxin Yu, Qi Shen, Hengli Li, Zhaowei Zhang, Song-Chun Zhu, Chi Zhang, Zilong Zheng
arXiv:2505. 09655v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning, specifically Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing mathematical reasoning.
By Xiwen Chen, Wenhui Zhu, Peijie Qiu, Xuanzhao Dong, Hao Wang, Haiyu Wu, Huayu Li, Aristeidis Sotiras, Yalin Wang, Abolfazl Razi
ReST‑RL introduces a unified Reinforced Self‑Training (ReST) policy‑value framework that enhances large language model (LLM) reasoning by combining an optimized ReST‑style GRPO algorithm with a value‑guided search (VM‑MCTS). The ReST‑GRPO component reshapes trajectory distributions to increase reward variance and expose policies to more informative partial states, improving training efficiency. VM‑MCTS trains a Value Model from self‑collected Monte‑Carlo Tree Search targets and uses it during inference to provide precise process signals and verification scores, boosting reasoning accuracy across coding benchmarks and out‑of‑domain math and science tasks.
By Sining Zhoubian, Dan Zhang, Jie Tang
arXiv:2606. 07720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities on mathematical and multi-hop planning tasks.
By Mujtaba Farhan, Maheep Chaudhary
arXiv:2601. 09085v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a standard approach for training mathematical reasoning models; however, its reliance on multiple completions per prompt makes training computationally expensive.
By Kangda Wei, Ruihong Huang
arXiv:2601. 11960v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing reinforcement learning methods for LLM reasoning implicitly assume that the policy generating training trajectories should coincide with the one producing inference responses.
By Jingchu Wang, Bingbing Xu, Yige Yuan, Dan Zhang, Bin Xie, Xiaoqian Sun, Huawei Shen