REWIND: Uncertainty-Guided Trajectory Repair for Test-Time Reasoning
2610.19561

Authors

Yi Ding,Mengyu Wang,Min Zhou,Menglin Yang

Abstract

An early mistake in the generated reasoning can constrain all subsequent reasoning. Repeated-generation methods, like MCMC-based approaches, attempt to improve output quality by sampling multiple generations, but their effectiveness can be limited by randomly selecting where to regenerate.

On MATH500 with Qwen2.5-Math-7B, we find that incorrect responses have substantially higher mean token entropy than correct responses, with an average within-question relative increase of approximately 112%, suggesting that entropy can signal reasoning errors. Motivated by this finding, we introduce REWIND, a training-free controller that uses entropy dynamics to propose targeted suffix regenerations.

Across three model families and five benchmarks, REWIND outperforms all baselines, with gains of 0.51-10.00 percentage points over the strongest baseline. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of targeted, uncertainty-guided trajectory repair across models and tasks.

Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/rewind-D310.

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