Although LLMs have made significant progress in mathematical reasoning, determining whether a mathematical problem is solvable remains a fundamental yet challenging capability. While recent studies have probed internal representations of model solvability beliefs, verbalization has primarily been studied behaviorally rather than as an internal representation, limiting its analysis and manipulation.
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.
By Kyle Cox, Darius Kianersi, Adri\`a Garriga-Alonso
The paper investigates how LLaMA 3.1‑8B models numerical sequence patterns, focusing on time‑series prediction. By designing a task that requires detecting structural cues—specifically first differences in a sequence—the authors show that the model performs well and internally computes and stores these differences. Probing and activation‑patching experiments reveal that LLaMA retrieves and applies the first‑difference via an induction‑like circuit, marking one of the first demonstrations of concept induction in large language models.
By Rahul Chowdhury, Timothy A Rupprecht, Senhao Cao, Jiahao Liu, Octavia Camps, David Bau, Pu Zhao, Yanzhi Wang
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.
By Michael Rizvi-Martel, Guillaume Rabusseau, Marius Mosbach
arXiv:2606. 29971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A growing body of work suggests that the reasoning capabilities of large language models are largely latent in their base form, with post-training primarily amplifying rather than introducing them.
By Aydin Javadov, Shyngys Aitkazinov, Tobias Hoesli, Florian von Wangenheim, Bjoern Schuller, Joseph Ollier
arXiv:2608.28600v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, yet the mathematically meaningful skills underlying their...
By Jonghyun Song, Sangjun Song, Minjae Oh, Haesung Pyun, Sungsik Lee, Yohan Jo
arXiv:2602. 04843v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier large language models increasingly solve complex tasks involving abstract concepts through extended test-time thinking.
By Dmitrii Kharlapenko, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Arth Singh, Alessandro Stolfo, Arthur Conmy, Mrinmaya Sachan, Zhijing Jin
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.
By Yuxiang Chen, Jun Wang
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:2608. 16118v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How should we assess whether large language models can perform mathematical invention?
By Silv\`ere Gangloff
The paper questions whether large language models (LLMs) truly introspect by critiquing recent studies that claim they can detect and report their internal states. It proposes two necessary conditions for genuine introspection: privileged access to internal representations and second‑order computation that distinguishes from first‑order task performance. Re‑examining two existing paradigms, the authors find that apparent introspective abilities can be explained by input‑based classifiers or generic anomaly detection, concluding that current evidence does not support metacognitive monitoring in LLMs.
By Shashwat Singh, Tal Linzen, Shauli Ravfogel
arXiv:2603.17839v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Verbal confidence -- prompting LLMs to state their confidence as a number or category -- is widely used to extract uncertainty estimates from...
By Dharshan Kumaran, Arthur Conmy, Federico Barbero, Simon Osindero, Viorica Patraucean, Petar Veli\v{c}kovi\'c