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Chopthin-Consensus Power Sampling: A Diversity-Preserving Approach to LLM Decoding

arXiv:2609.12243v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time power sampling via Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) can substantially improve large language model (LLM) reasoning without requiring post-training. However, many existing SMC approaches rely on equal-weight resampling, which can aggressively prune low-weight trajectories, discarding potentially correct reasoning paths and degrading the genealogical diversity of the search space. To address this, we introduce Chopthin-Consensus Power Sampling (CCPS). Our method applies the Chopthin resampler to LLM decoding: rather than equalizing weights and forcing unnecessary particle duplication, it enforces an upper bound on the ratio between the largest and smallest weights and carries the unequal weights forward. This targeted intervention preserves a richer set of distinct reasoning paths, keeps the weighted SMC approximation unchanged in conditional expectation, and guarantees a lower bound on the post-resampling effective sample size (ESS). To fully exploit this enriched population, we employ a semantic-majority selection mechanism that merges token-identical final trajectories, clusters semantically equivalent answers, and returns the answer supported by the largest number of distinct trajectories. Evaluating across three open-weight models and five reasoning benchmarks, we show that Chopthin increases oracle coverage in 13 of 15 settings. Combined with semantic-majority selection, CCPS matches or exceeds the final-answer accuracy of the Power-SMC baseline in 14 of 15 settings, delivering absolute gains of up to 10.6 percentage points. These findings demonstrate that diversity-preserving resampling and diversity-aware selection are complementary mechanisms for training-free LLM reasoning. Code is available at github.com/MinooAhmadii/chopthin-consensus-power-sampling.

Linear Exponential Quadratic Gaussian Covariance Steering

arXiv:2609.12463v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We formulate and analyze the linear exponential quadratic Gaussian (LEQG) covariance steering problem in continuous time over a given deadline (finite time horizon). The solution for this problem can be seen as a risk-sensitive Schr\"{o}dinger bridge between Gaussian endpoints in the linear quadratic setting. Unlike the risk-neutral case, the LEQG covariance steering controller--still a linear state feedback--can no longer be written in closed form. We show that the optimal controller is parameterized by a symmetric matrix solving an algebraic equation that encodes the implicit dependence on the risk-sensitivity parameter. We explain how the structure of this optimal controller significantly generalizes the existing results for the risk-neutral case. Building on these results, for the matched noise and input channel case, we prove the existence-uniqueness of solution for the LEQG covariance steering problem in the neighborhood of the known risk-neutral optimal solution. We give an illustrative numerical example.

An ab initio foundation model of wavefunctions that accurately describes chemical bond breaking

arXiv:2506.19960v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable description of bond breaking remains a major challenge for quantum chemistry due to the multireference character of the electronic structure in dissociating species. Multireference methods in particular suffer from large computational cost, which under the normal paradigm has to be paid anew for each system at a full price, ignoring commonalities in electronic structure across molecules. Quantum Monte Carlo with deep neural networks uniquely offers to exploit such commonalities by pretraining transferable wavefunction models, but all such attempts were so far limited in scope. Here, we bring this paradigm to fruition with Orbformer, a transferable wavefunction model pretrained on 22,000 equilibrium and dissociating structures that can be fine-tuned on unseen molecules reaching an accuracy-cost ratio rivalling classical multireference methods. On established benchmarks as well as more challenging bond dissociations and Diels-Alder reactions, Orbformer is the only method that consistently converges to chemical accuracy (1 kcal/mol). This work turns the idea of amortizing the cost of solving the Schr\"odinger equation over many molecules into a practical approach in quantum chemistry.

Transformers as In-Context Samplers: From Closed-Form Diffusion to Estimation-Free Sampling

arXiv:2609.08981v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A growing body of work establishes that large language models are not mere statistical memorizers, but are capable of in-context learning: performing inference at test time using only examples provided in the prompt, without any parameter updates. Prior theoretical work has shown that this capability extends to supervised learning tasks such as linear regression. We prove that in-context learning extends further to \emph{data generation}: frozen transformers can simulate iterative generative samplers from in-context samples. We first show that transformers can realize closed-form and smoothed closed-form diffusion samplers. The construction identifies a concrete generative role for softmax attention: it computes responsibility weights and weighted empirical averages, while feedforward layers implement Euler updates. To empirically relate these constructions to pretrained language models, we study \emph{semantic-topic sampling}: prompts consisting of words drawn from a common semantic category, such as animals, foods, or cities. Across transformer layers, the normalized hidden states exhibit a two-stage geometry: they move toward a uniform spherical reference in intermediate layers and then return to structured, topic-dependent representations near the output. We further measure an interacting-particle energy on these hidden-state clouds and observe the same U-shape pattern. We then prove that transformers can approximate an energy-based sampler, constructing the same U-shape energy across the layers.
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