Ji Zhang
Other people with similar names: Ji Zhang
2025
Revisiting Self-Consistency from Dynamic Distributional Alignment Perspective on Answer Aggregation
Yiwei Li
|
Ji Zhang
|
Shaoxiong Feng
|
Peiwen Yuan
|
Xinglin Wang
|
Jiayi Shi
|
Yueqi Zhang
|
Chuyi Tan
|
Boyuan Pan
|
Yao Hu
|
Kan Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Self-consistency improves reasoning by aggregating diverse stochastic samples, yet the dynamics behind its efficacy remain underexplored. We reframe self-consistency as a dynamic distributional alignment problem, revealing that decoding temperature not only governs sampling randomness but also actively shapes the latent answer distribution. Given that high temperatures require prohibitively large sample sizes to stabilize, while low temperatures risk amplifying biases, we propose a confidence-driven mechanism that dynamically calibrates temperature: sharpening the sampling distribution under uncertainty to align with high-probability modes, and promoting exploration when confidence is high. Experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks show this approach outperforms fixed-diversity baselines under limited samples, improving both average and best-case performance across varying initial temperatures without additional data or modules. This establishes self-consistency as a synchronization challenge between sampling dynamics and evolving answer distributions.
Speculative Decoding for Multi-Sample Inference
Yiwei Li
|
Jiayi Shi
|
Shaoxiong Feng
|
Peiwen Yuan
|
Xinglin Wang
|
Yueqi Zhang
|
Ji Zhang
|
Chuyi Tan
|
Boyuan Pan
|
Yao Hu
|
Kan Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
We propose a novel speculative decoding method tailored for multi-sample reasoning scenarios, such as self-consistency and Best-of-N sampling. Our method exploits the intrinsic consensus of parallel generation paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without requiring auxiliary models or external databases. By dynamically analyzing structural patterns across parallel reasoning paths through a probabilistic aggregation mechanism, it identifies consensus token sequences that align with the decoding distribution. Evaluations on mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks demonstrate a substantial improvement in draft acceptance rates over baselines, while reducing the latency in draft token construction. This work establishes a paradigm shift for efficient multi-sample inference, enabling seamless integration of speculative decoding with sampling-based reasoning techniques.