PEPS: Quantum-Inspired Reinforcement Learning for Coherent Reasoning Traces in LLMs

Abstract: LLMs often struggle with maintaining coherent multi-step reasoning traces, particularly in tasks that require a structured logical flow. This work introduces a quantum-inspired approach to address the challenge by incorporating a fidelity-based reward derived from Projected Entangled Pair States (PEPS) into Proximal Policy Optimization. Unlike prior approaches that use direct supervision or contrastive objectives, the proposed method guides learning through structural consistency, offering a novel approach to enforce global coherence in generated reasoning traces. The proposed framework is evaluated using multiple coherence-determining metrics on diverse datasets such as GSM8K, StrategyQA, and EntailmentBank spanning arithmetic, intuitive, and entailment-based reasoning. Results show that the proposed quantum-inspired approach offers significant improvements over supervised, contrastive, and pretrained baseline approaches, highlighting the effectiveness of quantum-inspired fidelity as a foundation to improve reasoning trace coherence in LLMs.