arXiv AI

Reading Between the Dots: Decoding Hidden Computation across Filler Tokens

arXiv:2607. 03502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier LLMs can perform multi-step reasoning over content-free filler tokens like dots or counting sequences, producing correct answers with no visible chain-of-thought (CoT).

arXiv AI
Sep 15

Bypass Observation: A Conceptual Design of a Non-Intrusive Layer-Wise Semantic Extraction Architecture

The paper proposes Bypass Observation, a non‑intrusive layer‑wise readout architecture that attaches read‑only observation heads to selected Transformer layers without feeding their outputs back into the backbone. Three variants are explored: a shared language‑model head across layers, layer‑specific heads, and a layer‑ or step‑adaptive head. The authors provide a closed‑form overhead estimate (≈ V/(12d)) and discuss ways to reduce cost, while distinguishing bypass chain‑of‑thought from conventional chain‑of‑thought and outlining potential applications to looped and recurrent‑depth Transformers.

By Haibin Tong, Jiang Yu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Trading Depth for Time in Recurrent Transformers

The paper investigates whether extra computation in recurrent Transformers should be allocated to more temporal steps or greater physical depth. Using Latent Recurrent Transformers (LRTs), the authors insert a latent thought token between vocabulary tokens, allowing each token to pass through the same $L$ layers twice while sharing parameters. Experiments on 16‑ and 20‑layer mixture‑of‑experts NanoChat backbones show that a single thought token brings a shallower model within 0.006–0.004 bits per byte of a double‑depth counterpart, recovering 67–81% of the improvement with roughly 48% fewer parameters.

By Zeyi Huang, Xuehai He, Yong Jae Lee, Yelong Shen
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 14

Visual Access Boundaries in Vision-Language Model Reasoning

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces. We ask whether CoT requires continued access to image tokens, or whether it mainly operates over visual information already made available earlier in the forward pass.

arXiv AI
Jul 15

Visual Access Boundaries in Vision-Language Model Reasoning

arXiv:2607. 12815v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces.

By Hiroto Osaka, Shohei Taniguchi, Gouki Minegishi, Kai Yamashita, Masahiro Suzuki, Yutaka Matsuo