The paper investigates whether different forms of intermediate computation in large language models—such as token-based traces, pause tokens, and latent reasoning—rely on the same underlying mechanism. By training five variants of GPTNeoX on an extended multi-hop reasoning task, the authors find that while vanilla, Chain-of-Thought, and Pause Token models perform well on in-distribution data, they fail to generalize to longer-hop out-of-distribution problems. In contrast, latent-reasoning models exhibit better depth generalization, with causal analysis revealing a sparse recurrent search circuit that implements forward reachability propagation across the graph.
arXiv:2606. 17803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance by scaling inference-time compute, yet remain fundamentally stateless, discarding the rich, self-produced reasoning traces generated during this process.
By Vaggelis Dorovatas, Nancy Kalaj, Rahaf Aljundi
arXiv:2606. 16360v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning in large language models (LLMs) by externalizing intermediate computation as discrete text tokens, but this textual interface also introduces redundancy and inference overhead.
By Hanyu Lin, Min Cai, Jiawei Wen, Haodi Zhang
arXiv:2608.21265v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models often rely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex tasks, but verbose reasoning traces introduce substantial inferen...
By Simeng Zhang, Yilong Chen, Wenyuan Zhang, Zhenyu Zhang, Yao Chen, Junyuan Shang, Tingwen Liu
arXiv:2607. 00341v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models achieve strong performance on many reasoning tasks when allowed to externalize intermediate steps as Chain-of-Thought (CoT).
By Hengyu Fu, Tianyu Guo, Zixuan Wang, Hanlin Zhu, Jason D. Lee, Jiantao Jiao, Stuart Russell, Song Mei
arXiv:2603.21676v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Standard Transformers have a fixed computational depth, limiting their ability to generalize to tasks that require variable-depth reasoning....
By Hung-Hsuan Chen
arXiv:2510. 08647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent developments have enabled advanced reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) via long Chain-of-Thought (CoT), trading efficiency during inference for performance.
By Chengzhengxu Li, Xiaoming Liu, Zhaohan Zhang, Shengchao Liu, Guoxin Ma, Yu Lan, Cong Wang, Chao Shen
arXiv:2603. 01331v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising a masked sequence.
By Kejing Xia, Mingzhe Li, Lixuan Wei, Zhenbang Du, Xiangchi Yuan, Dachuan Shi, Qirui Jin, Wenke Lee
LatentHarness unifies memory access and latent reasoning by treating them as sequential latent actions—THINK, RECALL, and EXIT—within a language model. It is trained via counterfactual policy distillation, which evaluates the impact of each action on the emitted token and learns when to recall evidence versus continue reasoning. On six long‑context reasoning benchmarks, a 1.4B‑parameter LatentHarness model outperforms the strongest baselines by 2.8% and 10.0% relative, while running 5.9× faster than the leading long‑context baseline.
By Xiaoqiang Wang, Suyuchen Wang, Bang Liu
arXiv:2505. 12992v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining.
By Baohao Liao, Hanze Dong, Yuhui Xu, Doyen Sahoo, Christof Monz, Junnan Li, Caiming Xiong
arXiv:2412.06769v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are typically constrained to reason in the language space, where they express the reasoning process through a chain-of...
By Shibo Hao, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, DiJia Su, Xian Li, Zhiting Hu, Jason Weston, Yuandong Tian
Latent Recurrent Thoughts (LRT) proposes a method for reasoning with frozen large language models by operating in the model’s continuous representation space. A small auxiliary network generates initial latent vectors, which a tiny recurrent reasoner refines over multiple steps, decoupling computational depth from model size. Experiments on symbolic and natural‑language reasoning tasks show that LRT outperforms prior frozen‑decoder continuous‑space methods and chain‑of‑thought prompting while using far less inference compute.
By Zhaoliang Chen, Jie Fu