arXiv Machine Learning

More Correct Mass, Worse Answers: Why Power Sampling Can Fail and How to Fix It

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.

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 AI
Aug 7

Refining Over Resampling: Test-Time Self-Correction for LLM Reasoning

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 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
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Selective Regenerative Decoding: Trajectory-Level Intervention for Inference-Time Reasoning

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
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Planned Test-Time Scaling with Coordinated Reasoning Paths

The paper introduces Planned Test-Time Scaling (PTTS), a method that replaces independent sampling of reasoning branches with a coordinated joint policy. PTTS uses a planner to generate distinct solution outlines for each branch and an executor to produce full solutions, thereby improving coverage of complementary reasoning modes. Two variants—PTTS‑ZS (zero‑shot) and PTTS‑RL (reinforcement‑learned)—demonstrate significant gains on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks, with PTTS‑RL achieving up to a 13.4‑point improvement in pass@64 over repeated sampling.

By Xueqing Wu, Langxing Bai, Hritik Bansal, Po-Nien Kung, Shuo Li, Hao Liu, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 25

Reasoning Quality Emerges Early: Data Curation for Reasoning Models

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on a small, high-quality set of long reasoning traces is an effective approach for eliciting strong reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods for curating high-quality SFT data rely heavily on strong reasoning models to filter examples based on diversity and difficulty, making the curation process costly while often yielding suboptimal data quality.