arXiv Machine Learning

Structured Inference with Large Language Gibbs

arXiv:2606. 19264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs) can serve as a substrate for structured reasoning over variables describing a complex world, but accessing this knowledge in a probabilistically coherent manner poses a difficult inference problem.

arXiv AI
Aug 3

AI4BayesCode: From Natural Language Descriptions to Validated Modular Stateful Bayesian Samplers

arXiv:2605. 18476v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Coding and computation remain major bottlenecks in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) workflows, especially as modern sampling algorithms have become increasingly complex and existing probabilistic programming systems remain limited in model support, extensibility, and composability.

By Jungang Zou, Alex Ziyu Jiang, Qixuan Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Recipes for Steering and Scaling LLMs via Sampling

The paper introduces a flexible, theoretically grounded framework for steering and scaling autoregressive large language models (LLMs) through sampling. It presents two algorithms—Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) and Replica Exchange (RE)—that guide generation toward desired distributions such as powering, product, or tilting of the base model. Experiments show these methods outperform Best‑of‑N and standard MCMC baselines, offering a systematic recipe for probabilistic inference with LLMs via sampling.

By Jiajun He, Zongyu Guo, Jos\'e Miguel Hern\'andez-Lobato, Yuanqi Du
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Extracting Probabilistic Knowledge from Large Language Models for Bayesian Network Parameterization

The paper investigates how Large Language Models can be used to approximate domain expert priors for Bayesian Networks by extracting probabilistic knowledge about real‑world events. Experiments on eighty publicly available networks across domains such as healthcare and finance show that LLM‑derived conditional probabilities outperform random, uniform, and next‑token baselines. The authors also demonstrate that these LLM‑generated priors can refine data‑driven distributions, especially when data is scarce, and provide the first comprehensive baseline for evaluating LLM performance in probabilistic knowledge extraction.

By Aliakbar Nafar, Kristen Brent Venable, Zijun Cui, Parisa Kordjamshidi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

d2: Improving Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models via Trajectory Likelihood Estimation

arXiv:2509. 21474v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While diffusion language models (DLMs) have achieved competitive performance in text generation, improving their reasoning ability with reinforcement learning remains an active research area.

By Guanghan Wang, Gilad Turok, Yair Schiff, Marianne Arriola, Volodymyr Kuleshov
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Reasoning about In-Context Samples for Machine-Translation

The paper proposes a fragment‑based reasoning framework for large language model–based machine translation. It extracts parallel source‑target fragments from retrieved similar examples and uses these fragments as intermediate reasoning traces to generate the final translation. Experiments with the Qwen3 model across six languages and multiple domains show that this approach outperforms standard k‑shot or basic drafting methods.

By Maxime Bouthors, Josep Crego, Fran\c{c}ois Yvon