arXiv AI

Interpreting Latent CoT Reasoning as Dynamical Systems

arXiv:2607. 09698v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent latent reasoning methods, such as CODI and COCONUT, face a fundamental interpretability problem: they maintain multiple superimposed candidate traces in the hidden space at each step, unlike explicit- CoT, which follows a single transparent reasoning trace.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

A*-Thought-V2: Efficient Latent Reasoning via Geometric Dynamics of LLM

A*-Thought-V2 is a framework that models Chain-of-Thought reasoning as a geometric trajectory in a 3D PCA space, using explicit-implicit latent tokens to compress steps that deviate from the main question-to-solution direction. The method measures alignment angles to decide which steps remain text and which become latent, and introduces stepwise embedding forcing and label forcing to train the architecture. Experiments on Qwen models show up to 2.6% accuracy gains, halved response length, and significant reductions in computation and training time.

By Xiaoang Xu, Siyuan Liu, Shuo Wang, Junlan Feng, Fanyu Meng, Zhu Zhang, Jixun Wang, Xiaorong Wang, Zihan Zhou, Xin Li, Chaojun Xiao, Yiming Zhang, Huijia Wu, Liuyu Xiang, Peipei Li, Zhaofeng He
arXiv AI
Aug 3

How Hard Does It Think? Analyzing Step-Aware Reasoning Energy in LLM Chain-of-Thought Trajectories

arXiv:2607. 28674v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding how computational effort is allocated across individual chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning steps remains an open challenge: existing interpretability methods rely on output-level signals or collapse processing depth into a single trajectory-level scalar, leaving step-wise effort opaque.

By Hui Wei, Junda Wu, Sheldon Yu, Sizhe Zhou, Yizhu Jiao, Ming Zhong, Bowen Jin, Tong Yu, Shijia Pan, Jiawei Han, Julian McAuley
arXiv AI
Sep 21

When Steering Fails in Latent Reasoning: A Latent-to-Language Transition Gap

The paper investigates the effectiveness of activation steering in latent chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning compared to explicit CoT. It finds that steering continuous latent thoughts yields weaker impacts on language generation, even when hidden representations are shifted similarly. The authors propose a latent-to-language transition gap, supported by evidence of abrupt output distribution changes at the transition boundary and weaker bidirectional control in latent CoT.

By Gaoxiang Huang, Lei Qi
arXiv AI
Jun 3

LatentChem: From Textual CoT to Latent Thinking in Chemical Reasoning

arXiv:2602. 07075v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current chemical large language models (LLMs) predominantly rely on explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to solve complex reasoning problems.

By Xinwu Ye, Yicheng Mao, Yuxuan Liao, Jia Zhang, Yimeng Liu, Li Hao, Fang Wu, Zhiwei Li, Zehong Wang, Zhiyuan Liu, Zhenfei Yin, Li Yuan, Philip Torr, Huan Sun, xiangxiang Zeng, Mengdi Wang, Le Cong, Shenghua Gao, Xiangru Tang