# AdaptFuse: Training-Free Sequential Preference Inference via Externalized Bayesian Computation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03925 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03925/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05221/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01206/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12186/) (2024)
- [An Explanation of In-context Learning as Implicit Bayesian Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02080/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model (LLM) Security and Privacy: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02003/) (2023)
- [Why Can GPT Learn In-Context? Language Models Implicitly Perform Gradient Descent as Meta-Optimizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10559/) (2022)
- [Exploring Large Language Model based Intelligent Agents: Definitions, Methods, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03428/) (2024)
- [Recommender AI Agent: Integrating Large Language Models for Interactive Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16505/) (2023)
- [The Emerged Security and Privacy of LLM Agent: A Survey with Case Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19354/) (2024)
- [Aligning LLM Agents by Learning Latent Preference from User Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15269/) (2024)
- [Navigating the Risks: A Survey of Security, Privacy, and Ethics Threats in LLM-Based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09523/) (2024)
- [Inferring Rewards from Language in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02515/) (2022)
- [Bayesian Teaching Enables Probabilistic Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17523/) (2025)
- [On the Properties of Kullback-Leibler Divergence Between Multivariate Gaussian Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05485/) (2021)
- [Enough Coin Flips Can Make LLMs Act Bayesian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04722/) (2025)
- [Towards Next-Generation Recommender Systems: A Benchmark for Personalized Recommendation Assistant with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09382/) (2025)
- [Learning Hierarchical Procedural Memory for LLM Agents through Bayesian Selection and Contrastive Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18950/) (2025)
- [BIRD: A Trustworthy Bayesian Inference Framework for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12494/) (2024)
- [Agentic Feedback Loop Modeling Improves Recommendation and User Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20027/) (2024)
- [Understanding Hyperbolic Metric Learning through Hard Negative Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15523/) (2024)
- [Large Language Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14025/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [CAPS: Cascaded Adaptive Pairwise Selection for Efficient Parallel Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15513/) (2026)
- [PathCal: State-Aware Reflection-Marker Calibration for Efficient Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23074/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) struggle to accumulate evidence across multiple rounds of user interactions, failing to update their beliefs in a manner consistent with Bayesian inference. Existing solutions require fine-tuning on sensitive user interaction data, limiting their applicability in privacy-conscious settings. We propose textscAdaptFuse, a training-free framework that externalizes probabilistic computation entirely from the LLM, where a symbolic module maintains a Bayesian posterior over a discrete hypothesis set, while a frozen LLM contributes semantic reasoning via multi-sample Dirichlet aggregation. The two signals are combined through entropy-adaptive fusion, which automatically weights each source by its predictive confidence, shifting reliance from the LLM to the symbolic posterior as evidence accumulates. We evaluate across three domains: flight recommendation, hotel recommendation, and web shopping; on Gemma~2 9B, Llama~3 8B, and Qwen~2.5 7B. textscAdaptFuse consistently outperforms both prompting baselines and fine-tuned Bayesian Teaching models on all tasks, with accuracy improving monotonically over interaction rounds. These results demonstrate that principled inference-time algorithms can substitute for fine-tuning in personalized recommendation, without storing or training on sensitive user data.
