The paper investigates when language diffusion models, specifically Uniform-based Discrete Diffusion Models (UDDMs), shift from memorizing training data to generalizing to new data. It shows that UDDMs act as associative memories, forming basins of attraction around stored examples without requiring an explicit energy function. By measuring token recovery and conditional entropy, the authors identify a sharp transition governed by training set size, where memorization (vanishing entropy) gives way to generalization (finite entropy).
By Bao Pham, Mohammed J. Zaki, Luca Ambrogioni, Dmitry Krotov, Matteo Negri
The paper investigates how continuous latent states in large language models can store multiple reasoning steps through superposition. It challenges the intuition that retaining only the current reasoning frontier is optimal, showing that cumulative superposition of the full reasoning history can actually require fewer representational dimensions. The authors demonstrate that this approach preserves more valid evidence, improves downstream outcome discrimination, and delays unreliability, while also establishing that uniform cumulative weighting of memories is minimax‑optimal for future reasoning.
By Hongyu Gu, Chang Liu, Jingwen Fu
The paper investigates whether different forms of intermediate computation in large language models—such as token-based traces, pause tokens, and latent reasoning—rely on the same underlying mechanism. By training five variants of GPTNeoX on an extended multi-hop reasoning task, the authors find that while vanilla, Chain-of-Thought, and Pause Token models perform well on in-distribution data, they fail to generalize to longer-hop out-of-distribution problems. In contrast, latent-reasoning models exhibit better depth generalization, with causal analysis revealing a sparse recurrent search circuit that implements forward reachability propagation across the graph.
arXiv:2605. 05686v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models draw on two knowledge sources: facts baked into weights (parametric memory, PM) and information in context (working memory, WM).
By Qiyao Liang, Risto Miikkulainen, Ila Fiete
arXiv:2608.28771v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large reasoning models achieve strong performance on complex tasks by generating extended chain-of-thought (CoT) traces via reinforcement learning with...
By Xin Jiang, Minhao Wang, Wen Wu, Zhentao Xie, Shangheng Du, Jinxin Shi, Jiabao Zhao
arXiv:2607. 08724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human decision-making is highly flexible -- some actions are taken immediately; others require longer deliberation.
By Chuning Zhu, Eva Xu, Jose Barreiros, Krishnan Srinivasan, Paarth Shah, Abhishek Gupta
arXiv:2606. 28589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current approaches to enhance Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, such as Chain-of-Thought and "Wait" prompts, primarily encourage models to think more, yet often fail to guide them toward Truth.
By Tianlong Wang, Yuhang Wang, Weibin Liao, Xin Gao, Xinyu Ma, Yang Lin, Yasha Wang, Liantao Ma
arXiv:2310.04363v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) compress knowledge from their training data through next-token conditional distributions. This limits t...
By Edward J. Hu, Moksh Jain, Eric Elmoznino, Younesse Kaddar, Guillaume Lajoie, Yoshua Bengio, Esmeralda S. Whitammer
arXiv:2605. 22873v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become the default strategy for enhancing LLM capabilities, yet its application raises a fundamental question: when is explicit reasoning actually beneficial?
By Wei Xia, Haoqing Wang, Zhi-Hong Deng, Yehui Tang
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.
By Hanyu Lin, Min Cai, Jiawei Wen, Haodi Zhang
DynHD is a method for detecting hallucinations in diffusion large language models (D‑LLMs) by focusing on token‑level uncertainty and its evolution during the denoising process. It introduces a semantic‑aware evidence construction module that filters out non‑informative structural tokens and highlights uncertainty in informative tokens, and a reference evidence generator that models the expected trajectory of uncertainty, enabling a deviation‑based detector to identify hallucinations. Experiments show DynHD outperforms existing baselines while being more efficient across various benchmarks and backbone models.
By Yanyu Qian, Yue Tan, Yixin Liu, Wang Yu, Shirui Pan
arXiv:2607. 21433v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B exhibit a bimodal convergence pattern: generations either terminate within a token budget (converged) or exhaust it without reaching a conclusion (non-converged).
By Renuka Oladri, Niveda Jawahar, Abdirisak Mohamed