arXiv Machine Learning

On the Effect of Sampling Diversity in Scaling LLM Inference

arXiv:2502. 11027v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model (LLM) scaling inference is key to unlocking greater performance, and leveraging diversity has proven an effective way to enhance it.

arXiv AI
Jun 17

Know Thy Reasoner: Not All Language Models Explore Alike

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 Computation and Language
Sep 14

Chopthin-Consensus Power Sampling: A Diversity-Preserving Approach to LLM Decoding

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
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Strategically Diverse Sampling for Self-Training

The paper introduces two new sampling techniques—GROOT and Verbalized Sampling—to create strategically diverse training data for self-training large language models. By focusing on substantive variation in problem-solving approaches rather than just correctness, the authors demonstrate that models trained on this data outperform those trained on IID samples across competitive programming and Next‑Chapter Prediction tasks. Notably, self‑training with strategically diverse but incorrect traces from Qwen3‑4B surpasses IID distillation from a 235B teacher, challenging assumptions about the importance of correctness and teacher scale.

By Alexander Gurung, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Mirella Lapata
arXiv AI
Jul 16

Representation-Based Exploration for Language Models: From Test-Time to Post-Training

arXiv:2510. 11686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to expand the capabilities of language models, but it is unclear if current RL techniques promote the discovery of novel behaviors, or simply sharpen those already present in the base model.

By Jens Tuyls, Dylan J. Foster, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Jordan T. Ash