The paper introduces AlgoTrace, a framework that traces and steers algorithmic operations in large language models’ latent space during multi‑step reasoning. By clustering latent activations on tasks such as TSP, 3SAT, AIME, and Graph Navigation, the authors identify reusable primitive vectors that can be injected to elicit specific algorithmic behaviors, composed algebraically, and transferred across models and tasks. Fine‑tuning further improves the composition of these primitives, suggesting that LLM reasoning can be viewed as a walk through algorithmic primitives governed by compositional geometry.
arXiv:2505.16782v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on complex tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, conventional CoT...
arXiv:2505. 12369v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-hop logical reasoning on knowledge graphs requires faithfully mapping the logical semantics to latent space.
arXiv:2606. 05402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) produce reasoning traces with non-linear structures, such as backtracking and self-correction, that complicate the evaluation and monitoring of the reasoning process.
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.
arXiv:2606. 07410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The emergence of "Aha moments" in large language models, particularly DeepSeek-R1-0120, has raised the question of whether these systems genuinely reason or merely imitate the appearance of reasoning.
arXiv:2609.14528v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-Hop Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) tasks require models to assemble relational evidence along paths in a KG to answer natural-langua...
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.
The paper investigates how large language models perform propositional logical reasoning by conducting a causal mechanistic analysis on the PropLogic-MI benchmark. It identifies four interlocking mechanisms—Staged Computation, Information Transmission, Fact Retrospection, and Specialized Attention Heads—that organize the reasoning process across layers. The study demonstrates that these mechanisms recur across different model families, rule categories, and reasoning hops, indicating a structured, layer‑organized internal process for propositional reasoning.
arXiv:2607. 23019v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enables large language models (LLMs) to tackle multi-step reasoning tasks, yet the generated intermediate steps are not guaranteed to be logically sound.
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) follow Occam's Razor when performing inductive and abductive reasoning. It introduces a synthetic framework for generating questions that require both types of reasoning and a new automated metric to evaluate the simplicity and correctness of generated hypotheses. Experiments show that while LLMs can handle simple scenarios, they struggle with complex world models and producing high‑quality, simplest hypotheses, even when using advanced reasoning techniques.
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.
arXiv:2608.29459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Skills, as a useful abstraction for the procedural capabilities of large language models (LLMs), capture how models perform structured, multi-step reas...