English

Thermodynamic Focusing for Inference-Time Search: Practical Methods for Target-Conditioned Sampling and Prompted Inference

Machine Learning 2025-12-24 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Finding rare but useful solutions in very large candidate spaces is a recurring practical challenge across language generation, planning, and reinforcement learning. We present a practical framework, \emph{Inverted Causality Focusing Algorithm} (ICFA), that treats search as a target-conditioned reweighting process. ICFA reuses an available proposal sampler and a task-specific similarity function to form a focused sampling distribution, while adaptively controlling focusing strength to avoid degeneracy. We provide a clear recipe, a stability diagnostic based on effective sample size, a compact theoretical sketch explaining when ICFA can reduce sample needs, and two reproducible experiments: constrained language generation and sparse-reward navigation. We further show how structured prompts instantiate an approximate, language-level form of ICFA and describe a hybrid architecture combining prompted inference with algorithmic reweighting.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.19717,
  title  = {Thermodynamic Focusing for Inference-Time Search: Practical Methods for Target-Conditioned Sampling and Prompted Inference},
  author = {Zhan Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.19717},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

4 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:37:28.538Z