{
  "id": "2609.35472",
  "title": "Why Deterministic PRM Guidance Underperforms in Discrete Diffusion Reasoning",
  "authors": "Yan Zhan, Shaobo Liu, Zhijun Gao",
  "first_public": "2026-09-28",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "arxiv": "2609.35472",
  "paper_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35472",
  "lens": [
    "analysis",
    "beyond-sequential"
  ],
  "representation": [
    "discrete-token"
  ],
  "computation": [
    "diffusion",
    "search"
  ],
  "training": [
    "analysis-only",
    "supervised"
  ],
  "questions": [
    "evaluation",
    "efficiency",
    "limitations"
  ],
  "evidence": [
    "empirical",
    "boundary"
  ],
  "modality": [
    "language",
    "symbolic"
  ],
  "summary": "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.",
  "provenance": "Primary-source literature search, 2026-10-18",
  "added_at": "2026-10-18",
  "author_names": [
    "Yan Zhan",
    "Shaobo Liu",
    "Zhijun Gao"
  ],
  "record_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.35472/",
  "legacy_record_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/#paper-2609-35472",
  "citation_date": "2026-09-28",
  "json_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.35472/record.json",
  "markdown_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.35472/index.md",
  "bibtex_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.35472/citation.bib",
  "csl_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.35472/citation.csl.json"
}