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Why Deterministic PRM Guidance Underperforms in Discrete Diffusion Reasoning

Yan Zhan, Shaobo Liu, Zhijun Gao

Compares process-reward guidance with independent sampling and final-answer reranking at matched forward-pass budgets. In the tested diffusion models, early pruning removes promising candidates and intermediate-state scorers can be poor final judges; the generated solutions remain textual.

First public: · Added to this list: October 18, 2026

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arXiv:2609.35472 · Initial submission: 2026-09-28

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Analysis and evaluation — Measure how well these methods work, investigate what their internal computation does, and identify where they fail. This includes experiments, studies of model internals, and mathematical results.

Alternative generation methods — Change how intermediate steps are generated, revised, or searched—for example, by refining several steps in parallel. These are related approaches: some still produce written chains of thought.

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