arXiv Computation and Language

Do Recommenders Need to Think in Words? Latent Reasoning for Efficient LLM-Based Recommendation

The paper introduces LatentRec, a framework that replaces inference-time chain-of-thought reasoning in large language model (LLM) recommender systems with training-time per-step supervision. It employs a 2.5 M-parameter Continuous Thought Module, Soft Token Selection, and a Per-step Reasoning Loss to guide intermediate hidden states toward the target semantic ID. After training, the module can be removed, yielding a 4–5 % relative improvement in HR@10 on Amazon benchmarks while reducing inference latency by 18.3×.

arXiv AI
Jul 31

WhisperRec: Latent Reasoning for Efficient Foundation Recommendation Models

arXiv:2607. 26621v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities, motivating their adoption as backbones for foundation recommendation models (FRMs).

By Hao Jiang, Peiru Du, Pengfei Yao, Mengting Li, Siyuan Lou, Kuo Cai, Sheng Yu, Qiang Luo, Jian Liang, Ruiming Tang, Fei Pan, Peng Jiang, Wenwu Ou
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

LLMAR: A Tuning-Free Recommendation Framework for Sparse and Text-Rich Industrial Domains

LLMAR is a tuning‑free recommendation framework designed for sparse, text‑rich industrial B2B domains. It transforms user behavioral history into structured semantic motives using LLM inference, employs a reflection loop to self‑correct hallucinations, and operates cost‑effectively with asynchronous batch processing. Experiments on MovieLens‑1M, Amazon Prime Pantry, and a construction risk dataset show LLMAR surpasses state‑of‑the‑art learning models, achieving up to a 54.6% nDCG@10 improvement while keeping inference costs around $1 per 1,000 users.

By Ryogo Hishikawa, Ichiro Kataoka, Shinya Yuda
arXiv AI
Oct 9

From Chain-of-Thought to Loops: Non-Autoregressive Latent Reasoning via Looped Transformers

The paper introduces LLoCoT, a looped latent‑reasoning framework that replaces the traditional left‑to‑right generation of chain‑of‑thought tokens with iterative refinement of a compact latent workspace using a shared transformer. By jointly updating latent slots over a few iterations and sampling latent tokens in parallel, LLoCoT feeds these into an autoregressive decoder for answer generation. Experiments on HumanEval and MBPP show that LLoCoT matches or surpasses explicit‑CoT baselines while dramatically reducing reasoning latency and increasing throughput.

By Gerard Grau Garc\'ia, Arnau Padr\'es Masdemont, Niccol\`o Grillo, Jordi Ros-Giralt, Arash Behboodi, Victor Conchello Vendrell
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 Computation and Language
Oct 1

LatentHarness: Learning Latent Actions for Memory and Reasoning via Counterfactual Policy Distillation

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