arXiv Machine Learning

Sampling via Decision-Flow: Training-Free Extraction of Improved Latent Reasoning Paths in Large Language Models

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.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 22

Provable Benefits of RLVR over SFT for Reasoning Models: Learning to Backtrack Efficiently

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that reinforcement fine-tuning of pretrained base models can lead to significant gains in reasoning performance at inference time. In this work, we theoretically analyze why reinforcement fine-tuning induces better reasoning ability than purely supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods.

arXiv AI
Jun 15

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

arXiv:2505. 12992v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining.

By Baohao Liao, Hanze Dong, Yuhui Xu, Doyen Sahoo, Christof Monz, Junnan Li, Caiming Xiong
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

LEEPS: Latent-Guided Explore-Exploit Prompt Sampling for Efficient RLVR in Large Language Models

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but prompt groups with identical rollout rewards consume generation budget without effective learning signals. Pre-rollout prompt selection can reduce this waste by screening prompts before rollout generation.

arXiv AI
Jul 29

Penelope: Localized Latent Recurrence for Efficient Structured Reasoning

arXiv:2607. 25915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Complex structured reasoning tasks often require additional computation, yet current language models obtain it mainly by increasing parameter scale or by serializing intermediate steps as chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens.

By Yutong Chen, Shouqian Shi, Xinran Liu, Haochen Wang, Jiaying Wang, Tianxing Xu, Yuanxi Wang, Zirui Ding
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Boosting LLM Exploration via Weak-Model Guidance in RLVR

The paper introduces a method to enhance large language model (LLM) exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) by guiding the target model with partial reasoning trajectories from smaller, weaker language models. This weak-model guidance disrupts over‑confidence, preserves generative diversity, and mitigates entropy collapse without extra fine‑tuning or complex reward designs. Experiments on mathematical benchmarks show consistent improvements over vanilla RLVR, especially as the number of allowed attempts ($k$) increases, indicating broader reasoning coverage.

By Xingyu Shen, Huishuai Zhang, Peng Li, Yinchun Wang, Dongyan Zhao