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Self-Steering Language Models

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arxiv 2504.07081 v2 pith:Z4TV3J53 submitted 2025-04-09 cs.CL cs.AI

Self-Steering Language Models

classification cs.CL cs.AI
keywords modelsinferencelanguagereasoningdisciplfollowersearchself-steering
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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While test-time reasoning enables language models (LMs) to tackle complex tasks, searching or planning in natural language can be slow, costly, and error-prone. But even when LMs struggle to emulate the precise reasoning steps needed to solve a problem, they often excel at describing its abstract structure--both how to verify solutions and how to search for them. This paper introduces DisCIPL, a method for "self-steering" LMs where a Planner model generates a task-specific inference program that is executed by a population of Follower models. Our approach equips LMs with the ability to write recursive search procedures that guide LM inference, enabling new forms of verifiable and efficient reasoning. When instantiated with a small Follower (e.g., Llama-3.2-1B or Qwen3-1.7B), DisCIPL matches (and sometimes outperforms) much larger models, including GPT-4o and o1, on challenging constrained generation tasks. Our work opens up a design space of highly-parallelized Monte Carlo inference strategies that outperform standard best-of-N sampling, require no finetuning, and can be implemented automatically by existing LMs.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. SPIRAL: Learning to Search and Aggregate

    cs.AI 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    SPIRAL is a reinforcement learning framework that jointly optimizes sequential reasoning, parallel trace generation, and aggregation in language models for improved test-time performance.

  2. Extreme Low-Bit Inference in Reasoning Models: Failure Modes and Targeted Recovery

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    2-bit quantized reasoning models exhibit process failures like loops and delayed commitment that degrade end-to-end performance, but FP16 planning and loop rescue recover accuracy on MATH-500 from 17.2% to 74.2% for Q...

  3. A Mechanistic View of Authority Hierarchy in LLM Sycophancy

    cs.CL 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Authority sycophancy in LLMs is a layer-localized erasure of correct answer representations that scales with authority level and resists simple interventions.

  4. When Less is Enough: Efficient Inference via Collaborative Reasoning

    cs.LG 2026-05 conditional novelty 6.0

    A large model generates a compact reasoning signal that a small model uses to solve tasks, reducing the large model's output tokens by up to 60% on benchmarks like AIME and GPQA.

  5. RefineStat: Efficient Exploration for Probabilistic Program Synthesis

    cs.LG 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RefineStat improves small language model performance on probabilistic program synthesis by adding semantic constraint enforcement and diagnostic-aware refinement, producing syntactically and statistically reliable cod...