# HyperGuide: Hyperbolic Guidance for Efficient Multi-Step Reasoning in Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24140 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24140/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 49 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/prompting-and-chain-of-thought-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [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)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07974/) (2024)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08265/) (2019)
- [s1: Simple test-time scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19393/) (2025)
- [Math-Shepherd: Verify and Reinforce LLMs Step-by-step without Human Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08935/) (2023)
- [Solving math word problems with process- and outcome-based feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14275/) (2022)
- [Graph of Thoughts: Solving Elaborate Problems with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09687/) (2023)
- [Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14992/) (2023)
- [Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06769/) (2024)
- [Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01815/) (2017)
- [Poincar'e Embeddings for Learning Hierarchical Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08039/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00515/) (2024)
- [Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16419/) (2025)
- [Hyperbolic Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09112/) (2018)
- [Hyperbolic Graph Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12933/) (2019)
- [Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09567/) (2025)
- [PlanBench: An Extensible Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Planning and Reasoning about Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10498/) (2022)
- [ReST-MCTS*: LLM Self-Training via Process Reward Guided Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03816/) (2024)
- [Language Models Are Greedy Reasoners: A Systematic Formal Analysis of Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01240/) (2022)
- [ProofWriter: Generating Implications, Proofs, and Abductive Statements over Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13048/) (2020)
- [From System 1 to System 2: A Survey of Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17419/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Hesitation Has a Geometry: Entropy-Trained Hyperbolic Probes for Sparse Activation Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02391/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Searching over alternative continuations lets large language models (LLMs) compare the downstream consequences of a reasoning step before committing to it, but expanding and evaluating many branches makes inference expensive. Training value models to score intermediate steps does not avoid this cost, as they still rank candidates at inference time. We introduce HyperGuide, a framework that treats reasoning as movement through a tree of states embedded in hyperbolic space. HyperGuide first trains a state encoder on the Poincar'e ball, then trains a guidance head to predict the direction of a minimum-cost transition from the current state. The predicted direction is inserted into the decoder as a virtual token after each reasoning step, so inference follows a single autoregressive trajectory without expanding or reranking candidates. Because the supervision is ordinal rather than binary, it favors continuations that are both reliable and short, which steers generation toward successful, concise solutions. Experiments on competition mathematics and code generation show that HyperGuide matches or exceeds the accuracy of search- and verifier-based baselines while generating substantially fewer tokens than these baselines and about as many as few-shot prompting.
