arxivcs.AIcs.CL2026-07-07
When Does In-Context Search Help? A Sampling-Complexity Theory of Reflection-Driven Reasoning
Yotam Wolf, Noam Wies, Amnon Shashua
Training large language models (LLMs) with extended reasoning has enabled in-context search, in which models iteratively generate, critique, and revise solution attempts. We provide a theoretical analysis of in-context search by modeling it as approximate inference over reasoning…