LatticeSMC: Where to Spend Inference-Time Compute in Chunked Sequence Generators

Long-form generators for music, motion and video produce sequences chunk by chunk, with each chunk generated by iterative denoising while rewards are defined over the full sequence. Existing inference-time steering methods typically act on one axis at a time: best-of-N at the end, Feynman-Kac steering across denoising steps, or streaming pruning across chunks, and are often compared under unmatched compute or different return rules. We introduce budget-matched chunked steering and propose LatticeSMC, a sampler derived from a Feynman-Kac model on the two-dimensional lattice of chunk index and denoising step. Two telescoping results make its design exact: for chunk-additive rewards, the two axes induce identical weights, so resampling should occur where lookahead is cheapest; for terminal rewards, any prefix score defines an exact intermediate potential, making prefix-evaluable rewards twists with no estimation or extra denoiser calls. LatticeSMC resamples on these potentials at chunk boundaries and, when scoring is free, within chunks, returning either a weighted draw or the best particle. Under matched compute, on music-to-dance diffusion and 40-second text-to-music generation, it raises beat alignment from 0.234 to 0.441 (best-of-N: 0.354) and prompt adherence from 0.470 to 0.560 at 32 particles, while preserving held-out quality. It also retains its advantage on long-range rewards and is preferred by human raters in 60-77 percent of pairwise comparisons. Finally, we show that commitment strength should follow the information in the current potential, while the value of lookahead is predicted by the within-set predictability of future reward.