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