AAAI 2026

January 25, 2026

Singapore, Singapore

Would you like to see your presentation here, made available to a global audience of researchers?
Add your own presentation or have us affordably record your next conference.

Best-of-$N$ reasoning improves the accuracy of language models in solving mathematical tasks by sampling multiple candidate solutions and then selecting the best one based on some criteria. A critical bottleneck for this strategy is the output diversity limit, which occurs when the model generates similar outputs despite stochastic sampling, and hence recites the same error. To address this lack of variance in reasoning paths, we propose a novel unsupervised activation steering strategy that simultaneously optimizes the steering vectors for multiple reasoning trajectories at test time. At any synchronization anchor along the batch generation process, we find the steering vectors that maximize the total volume spanned by all possible intervened activation subsets. We demonstrate that these steering vectors can be determined by solving a Riemannian optimization problem over the product of spherical manifolds with a log-determinant objective function. We then use a Riemannian block-coordinate descent algorithm with a well-tuned learning rate to obtain a stationary point of the problem, and we apply these steering vectors until the generation process reaches the subsequent synchronization anchor. Empirical evaluations on popular mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that our test-time Riemannian activation steering strategy outperforms vanilla sampling techniques in terms of generative diversity and solution accuracy.

Downloads

Paper

Next from AAAI 2026

Self-Improving Sparse Retrieval Through Heuristic Representation Refinement and Representation-Focused Learning
poster

Self-Improving Sparse Retrieval Through Heuristic Representation Refinement and Representation-Focused Learning

AAAI 2026

+1
Xiaojing Li and 3 other authors

25 January 2026

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

Select topic of interest (you can select more than one)

PRESENTATIONS

  • All Presentations
  • For Librarians
  • Resource Center
  • Free Trial
Underline Science, Inc.
1216 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001, USA

© 2025 Underline - All rights reserved