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.
arXiv:2604. 06374v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Latent reasoning via continuous chain-of-thoughts (Latent CoT) has emerged as a promising alternative to discrete CoT reasoning.
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:2601.08058v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting often improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), but the internal signal that trigg...
arXiv:2609.07406v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves the reasoning ability of large language models by introducing intermediate computation, but explicit rational...
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.
arXiv:2603. 01437v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As chain of thought (CoT) has become central to scaling reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), it has also emerged as a promising tool for interpretability, suggesting the opportunity to understand model decisions through verbalized reasoning.
arXiv:2606. 31779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models typically reason via explicit chain-of-thought (CoT), generating intermediate steps token-by-token.
arXiv:2606. 01243v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent reasoning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform multi-step inference within continuous hidden states, offering efficiency gains over explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT).
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. 06447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models often improve reasoning by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT), demonstrating the importance of intermediate computation.
arXiv:2607. 29062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model capabilities have improved in large part due to scaling chain of thought.
arXiv:2607. 06648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent reasoning methods perform multi-step inference entirely in the model's continuous hidden states, promising more compact and efficient reasoning.