Characterizing a Configuration Where Inference-Time PRM-Pruned Fragment Grafting Is Inert: Evidence from Three Reasoning LMs

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2610.00047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diversity collapse in parallel chain-of-thought has motivated inference-time interventions built on a natural design: when a process reward model (PRM) prunes a chain, its high-PRM prefix is extracted and grafted verbatim as an in-context demonstration into a still-decoding sibling. We isolate this mechanism, PRM-Pruned Fragment Grafting (PPFG), as the most cost-minimal operationalization of cross-trajectory step-level transfer, and test it at the operating point where prior fragment-grafting work reports gains only under additional compensating ingredients. On Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct with Math-Shepherd on full MATH500 (n=500, three seeds), PPFG in both stagnation- and random-targeting variants is statistically indistinguishable from an independe