Power‑SMC is a training‑free sampling method that targets the sequence‑level power distribution used to sharpen large language model outputs for reasoning tasks. It maintains multiple candidate sequences, assigns importance weights based on how well each matches the power distribution, and periodically prunes low‑scoring candidates to keep inference latency close to standard decoding. Experiments on MATH500, GSM8K, GPQA, and HumanEval show that Power‑SMC matches or surpasses Metropolis–Hastings sampling in accuracy, preserves output diversity, and can accelerate inference speed by up to 17.6×.
By Seyedarmin Azizi, Erfan Baghaei Potraghloo, Minoo Ahmadi, Souvik Kundu, Massoud Pedram
arXiv:2608. 14420v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Power Sampling sharpens a language model's distribution over complete generation trajectories, offering a verifier-free way to improve reasoning at inference time.
By Haohui Yang, Jiaxing Sun, Xiujun Ma
arXiv:2609.38104v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Power-sharpened sampling is an inference-time alternative to reinforcement-learning (RL) post-training for enhancing reasoning in large language models...
By Panagiotis Theodoropoulos, Nan Jiang, Xintong Duan, Ali Hasan, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Evangelos A. Theodorou, Wei Deng
arXiv:2610.20483v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study how to improve LLM reasoning at inference time without updating model weights or using external reward models. Recent reward-free power-sampli...
By Weixin Wang, Wei Deng, Anderson Schneider, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Pan Xu, Andrew Bennett
arXiv:2605.30327v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Frontier reasoning models are produced by post-training base language models with reinforcement learning. Recent work has challenged this by...
By Felix Zhou, Anay Mehrotra, Quanquan C. Liu
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
The paper introduces Scalable Power Sampling, a training‑free method that sharpens a large language model’s generative distribution by approximating the autoregressive power distribution with a token‑level scaled low‑temperature distribution. This approach eliminates the need for iterative Markov chain Monte Carlo, achieving performance comparable to or better than one‑shot GRPO on math, QA, and code tasks while cutting inference latency by more than tenfold. The method relies solely on the base model’s outputs, requiring no external rewards or verifiers.
By Xiaotong Ji, Rasul Tutunov, Matthieu Zimmer, Haitham Bou Ammar
The paper introduces TTT‑Consolidate, a framework that leverages multi‑agent reasoning trajectories as adaptation data to improve subsequent reasoning. It consolidates these trajectories into parametric representations via test‑time training and then generates a new solution conditioned on the consolidated information, with meta‑learning used to optimize the consolidation process. Using the newly created OpenParallelThinking corpus of 12,810 math problems and trajectories from six LLMs, TTT‑Consolidate outperforms existing aggregation baselines by up to 20 percentage points on challenging math and STEM benchmarks, especially as model size grows.
By Haotian Wu, Zeming Chen, Hao Zhao, Antoine Bosselut
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:2610.08563v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Sequence-level power sampling has recently emerged as a training-free approach to reasoning by sampling from a sharpened output distribution of a base...
By Bingnan Xiao, Chenhao Yang, Bingcong Li, Wei Ni, Xin Wang
arXiv:2605. 25143v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Test-time scaling improves language model reasoning by spending additional compute to explore multiple solution trajectories.
By Dao Tran, Duc Anh Le, Ngoc Luu, Quan Pham, Tung Pham, Hung Bui
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