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Adaptive Blockwise Search: Inference-Time Alignment for Large Language Models

Quamar, Mohammad Atif, Areeb, Mohammad, Sharma, Nishant, Shreekumar, Ananth, Rosenthal, Jonathan, Ozmen, Muslum Ozgur, Kuznetsov, Mikhail, Celik, Z. Berkay

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

LLM alignment remains a critical challenge. Inference-time methods provide a flexible alternative to fine-tuning, but their uniform computational effort often yields suboptimal alignment. We hypothesize that for many alignment tasks, the initial tokens of a response are disproportionately more critical. To leverage this principle, we introduce AdaSearch, a novel blockwise search strategy. It adaptively allocates a fixed computational budget using a sampling schedule, focusing search effort on these critical tokens. We apply AdaSearch to sequential decoding and introduce its tree-search counterpart, AdaBeam. Our comprehensive evaluation across eight LLMs demonstrates that AdaSearch outperforms strong Best-of-N and fine-tuning baselines. Specifically, win-rates improve by over 10% for harmlessness generation, controlled sentiment generation, and for mathematical reasoning tasks relative to Best-of-N.




6a10bbd480e4c5573d8f3af73ae0454b-AuthorFeedback.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Thanks for the VERY careful, responsible and competent reviews our paper has received! Here we comment only on the more significant questions raised. " relate to: "Non-Redundant Spectral Dimensionality Reduction", Michaeli et al. " Will do. " We will discuss this reference in final paper. " the paper does not focus on how to optimize this objective function" In a longer paper, optimization See also below, and Supplements C, D, E1. We did not find any answers to this in the literature (so far). " Local injectivity is by


GraphSearch: An Agentic Deep Searching Workflow for Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Yang, Cehao, Wu, Xiaojun, Lin, Xueyuan, Xu, Chengjin, Jiang, Xuhui, Sun, Yuanliang, Li, Jia, Xiong, Hui, Guo, Jian

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) enhances factual reasoning in LLMs by structurally modeling knowledge through graph-based representations. However, existing GraphRAG approaches face two core limitations: shallow retrieval that fails to surface all critical evidence, and inefficient utilization of pre-constructed structural graph data, which hinders effective reasoning from complex queries. To address these challenges, we propose \textsc{GraphSearch}, a novel agentic deep searching workflow with dual-channel retrieval for GraphRAG. \textsc{GraphSearch} organizes the retrieval process into a modular framework comprising six modules, enabling multi-turn interactions and iterative reasoning. Furthermore, \textsc{GraphSearch} adopts a dual-channel retrieval strategy that issues semantic queries over chunk-based text data and relational queries over structural graph data, enabling comprehensive utilization of both modalities and their complementary strengths. Experimental results across six multi-hop RAG benchmarks demonstrate that \textsc{GraphSearch} consistently improves answer accuracy and generation quality over the traditional strategy, confirming \textsc{GraphSearch} as a promising direction for advancing graph retrieval-augmented generation.



Iterative Self-Incentivization Empowers Large Language Models as Agentic Searchers

Shi, Zhengliang, Yan, Lingyong, Yin, Dawei, Verberne, Suzan, de Rijke, Maarten, Ren, Zhaochun

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely integrated into information retrieval to advance traditional techniques. However, effectively enabling LLMs to seek accurate knowledge in complex tasks remains a challenge due to the complexity of multi-hop queries as well as the irrelevant retrieved content. To address these limitations, we propose EXSEARCH, an agentic search framework, where the LLM learns to retrieve useful information as the reasoning unfolds through a self-incentivized process. At each step, the LLM decides what to retrieve (thinking), triggers an external retriever (search), and extracts fine-grained evidence (recording) to support next-step reasoning. To enable LLM with this capability, EXSEARCH adopts a Generalized Expectation-Maximization algorithm. In the E-step, the LLM generates multiple search trajectories and assigns an importance weight to each; the M-step trains the LLM on them with a re-weighted loss function. This creates a self-incentivized loop, where the LLM iteratively learns from its own generated data, progressively improving itself for search. We further theoretically analyze this training process, establishing convergence guarantees. Extensive experiments on four knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that EXSEARCH substantially outperforms baselines, e.g., +7.8% improvement on exact match score. Motivated by these promising results, we introduce EXSEARCH-Zoo, an extension that extends our method to broader scenarios, to facilitate future work.