arXiv AI By Dake Bu, Wei Huang, Andi Han, Atsushi Nitanda, Bo Xue, Qingfu Zhang, Hau-San Wong, Taiji Suzuki

Distributional Biases in Post-Training: A Markovian Analysis of Reasoning Trajectories

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arXiv:2511. 07368v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models exhibit broad knowledge but limited task-specific reasoning, motivating post-training strategies such as RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and test-time scaling (TTS).

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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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.

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How Much Backtracking is Enough? Exploring the Interplay of SFT and RL in Enhancing LLM Reasoning

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Sampling via Decision-Flow: Training-Free Extraction of Improved Latent Reasoning Paths in Large Language Models

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