Escaping Redundant Reasoning: Structure-Aware Search for Inference-Time LLMs

Abstract:Inference-time search with large language models (LLMs) often concentrates on a small set of structurally or semantically similar trajectories, leaving alternatives underexplored---a failure mode we call \textit{reasoning basin collapse}. We introduce BASIN, a training-free, structure-aware selection method that groups reasoning states into basins and penalizes repeated visits to the same strategy, thereby reallocating search across genuinely distinct reasoning paths under a fixed compute budget. Under matched inference budgets, BASIN improves over Tree of Thoughts (ToT) by up to $+22$pp on Game of 24 and $+6.7$pp on MuSR. A quality-aware variant, QA-BASIN, further improves robustness by preserving high-quality basins when unconditional diversification over-explores. To explain when basin-aware selection helps, we introduce the redundancy gap $\Delta$, which measures how differently search concentrates for correct versus incorrect predictions: standard ToT often operates near $\Delta \approx 0$, while BASIN consistently shifts $\Delta$ positive. More broadly, BASIN suggests structure-aware selection as a simple and general approach to improving inference-time reasoning. Code can be found at this https URL.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.00738 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.00738v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.00738 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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