English

SPREG: Structured Plan Repair with Entropy-Guided Test-Time Intervention for Large Language Model Reasoning

Artificial Intelligence 2026-04-21 v1

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to logical hallucinations and stochastic drifts during long-chain reasoning. While Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) can improve instruction adherence, standard static implementations often cause semantic dilution and linguistic degradation. We propose SPREG (Structured Plan-guided Real-time Entropy Gating), a lightweight inference-time framework for surgical error rectification. SPREG employs an adaptive dual-threshold mechanism to monitor real-time entropy, identifying sudden ``entropy spikes'' as reliable indicators of logical failure. Upon detection, it triggers a dynamic repair by replacing uninformative null-priors with reference distributions synthesized from historical high-confidence states. By modulating guidance intensity according to structured reasoning stages (e.g., Action, Observation), SPREG steers the model back to a stable manifold without compromising fluency. Our experiments demonstrate significant gains, notably a 20.0% absolute accuracy improvement on AIME25, while effectively suppressing uncontrolled entropy drift in complex tasks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.17884,
  title  = {SPREG: Structured Plan Repair with Entropy-Guided Test-Time Intervention for Large Language Model Reasoning},
  author = {Xuan Wang and Yu Ming and Xinhao Zhong and Xinyu Yu and Wenjie Wang and Shuai Chen and Wei Lin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.17884},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:17:45.361Z