Reasoning with Sampling: Cutting at Decision Points
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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...
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.
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.
arXiv:2607. 09693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the dominant paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but it requires expensive training, curated data, and reward signals.
arXiv:2606. 09926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampling from the sequence-level power distribution $p^\alpha$ elicits RL-level reasoning from base language models without any parameter updates, but the standard Metropolis--Hastings (MH), a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler, is both expensive and slow-mixing.
arXiv:2606. 01682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Selecting the best response from multiple small-model samples using a stronger scorer is a simple inference-time strategy, but fails when the small model has already committed to incorrect reasoning paths.