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arXiv · 2512.19717

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

Zhan Zhang
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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.

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Zhan Zhang. 2025-12-16. Thermodynamic Focusing for Inference-Time Search: Practical Methods for Target-Conditioned Sampling and Prompted Inference. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19717

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