The paper introduces BASIN, a training‑free, structure‑aware selection method that groups reasoning states into basins and penalizes repeated visits to the same strategy, thereby redistributing search across distinct reasoning paths within a fixed compute budget. BASIN outperforms the Tree of Thoughts (ToT) baseline by up to +22 percentage points on Game of 24 and +6.7 percentage points on MuSR, and its quality‑aware variant QA‑BASIN further enhances robustness by preserving high‑quality basins. The authors also define a redundancy gap metric, Δ, to quantify how search concentrates differently for correct versus incorrect predictions, showing that ToT often operates near Δ ≈ 0 while BASIN consistently shifts Δ positive.
By Lu Cheng
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
arXiv:2604. 10827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Compute scaling for LLM reasoning trades off exploring solution approaches (\emph{breadth}) against refining promising ones (\emph{depth}), yet why a given trade-off works, and why it often fails to transfer across models, remains unclear.
By Moulik Choraria, Argyrios Gerogiannis, Anirban Das, Supriyo Chakraborty, Sourya Basu, Sambit Sahu, Lav R. Varshney
arXiv:2608.30395v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As pretraining scaling laws approach saturation, Test-Time Scaling (TTS) has emerged as an important direction for improving reasoning by allocating in...
By Jiaqi Wei, Xiang Zhang, Yuejin Yang, Wenxuan Huang, Juntai Cao, Sheng Xu, Xiang Zhuang, Zhangyang Gao, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Laks VS Lakshmanan, Chenyu You, Wanli Ouyang, Siqi Sun
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
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
arXiv:2608. 15303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time compute can substantially improve Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning performance, yet how and when additional compute helps remains poorly understood.
By Bo Wen, Yuhao Chen, Erhan Bilal, Carla Agurto Rios, Chen Wang, Junchen Jiang
G-ReAct is a reasoning framework that frames deep search as state evolution over a fixed-topology query graph, enabling explicit tracking of search progress and constraint preservation. It generates high-quality trajectories for fine-tuning and provides structured guidance during inference without extra fine-tuning. Experiments show that with only 1.9K generated trajectories, a Qwen3 model achieves strong accuracy on BrowseComp-ZH and XBench, outperforming larger open-source baselines, and consistently improves existing LLMs on deep-search tasks.
By Shaoxiong Yang, Mengyuan Zhang, Shaojun Lin, Chao Li, Wei Liu, Kun Shao, Jian Luan
Selective Regenerative Decoding (SRD) is a new inference-time decoding method that improves large language model reasoning by allowing segment-level intervention on candidate trajectories. Instead of discarding or keeping entire trajectories, SRD selectively refines only the degraded suffix while preserving useful prefixes, leading to higher expected trajectory quality and better sample efficiency. Experiments on MATH500, GPQA Diamond, HotpotQA, and AlpacaEval show that SRD matches Best-of-N accuracy with fewer generated tokens and outperforms speculative rejection in low‑compute settings.
By Sophia Xiao Pu, Yumo Xu, Sailik Sengupta, Millennium Bismay, Ruixue Lian, James Gung, Yi-an Lai, Arshit Gupta
The paper introduces SAGE, a framework designed to reduce long‑horizon reasoning biases in large language models. It identifies two key biases—exploration bias and compounding bias—arising from complex reasoning spaces and sparse rewards, and proposes Symbolic Closure Analysis (SCA) to understand these effects. SAGE applies algebraic sparsification and hyperbolic structural guidance to suppress spurious branching and provide dense depth‑wise signals, achieving up to an eight‑fold improvement on the Andrews‑Curtis problem across multiple benchmarks and model families.
By Xinyue Zeng, Jiawei Zhang, Yujun Yan, Dawei Zhou
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