CoTS: Competitive Token Selection for Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models proposes a training‑free framework that replaces binary latent reasoning decisions with continuous token‑level allocation. By using the probability competition between the two most likely tokens, CoTS dynamically balances discrete commitment and soft exploration at each reasoning step, eliminating the need for manually tuned thresholds or additional forward passes. Experiments on six reasoning benchmarks show that CoTS consistently outperforms standard Chain‑of‑Thought and other state‑of‑the‑art training‑free latent reasoning methods.
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.
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.
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.
Large Reasoning Models often overthink, producing redundant reasoning steps that consume many tokens. The authors observe that efficient reasoning steps cluster in a concentrated region of latent space, while verbose steps lie outside this region. By projecting deviating hidden states back into the region via a quadratic program, they propose a training‑free framework that cuts token generation by up to 52.8% while improving accuracy by up to 12.1% across several benchmarks.
arXiv:2505. 12992v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining.
Large language models often improve reasoning by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT), demonstrating the importance of intermediate computation. However, textual CoT forces this computation through a discrete, serial, and communication-oriented token stream: each reasoning step must be verbalized before the model can proceed, even when the underlying update is semantic, uncertain, or only partially formed.
The paper reports that in on‑policy distillation for large language models, reasoning performance can be improved by supervising only a tiny fraction of generated tokens—sometimes just one or two tokens per reasoning trajectory, about 0.05% of all tokens. This sparse supervision consistently matches or exceeds full‑token training across nine teacher‑student setups on mathematical reasoning, and is also validated on coding reasoning, Llama models, and PPO‑based reinforcement learning with verifiable reward. The findings suggest that effective post‑training does not require token‑intensive supervision and may align more closely with natural learning processes that focus on critical reasoning steps.
The paper introduces Decision-Flow Sampling (DF‑Sample), a training‑free, data‑free inference framework that builds a hierarchical reasoning tree, evaluates entire trajectories, and back‑propagates utilities to guide branching decisions. Unlike local step‑wise sampling, DF‑Sample explicitly assesses global paths, enabling it to recover high‑quality, low‑probability reasoning chains that standard decoding misses. On the GPQA benchmark, DF‑Sample attains 45.6% accuracy, outperforming power sampling (38.9%) and GRPO (39.9%) and consistently surpassing baselines across multiple models and benchmarks, demonstrating significant latent reasoning potential in pretrained LLMs.
arXiv:2607. 19691v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become the predominant recipe for eliciting test-time scaling in explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoners.
arXiv:2607. 16972v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous Chain-of-Thought methods replace verbose reasoning traces with a short sequence of dense latent representations.
arXiv:2602. 08324v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning successfully enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it incurs substantial computational overhead for inference.
arXiv:2606. 16222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on intermediate reasoning, yet explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) suffers from a linguistic space bottleneck: each thought must be decoded into tokens, causing high inference overhead.