arXiv AI

Do Latent Tokens Think? A Causal and Adversarial Analysis of Chain-of-Continuous-Thought

arXiv AI
Sep 21

When Steering Fails in Latent Reasoning: A Latent-to-Language Transition Gap

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 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
Oct 19

Sep-Latent: Separator Tokens as Natural Compression Anchors for Implicit Reasoning

Sep‑Latent introduces separator tokens as natural compression anchors for implicit reasoning in large language models, enabling the model to aggregate and compress reasoning logic into these anchors via an Attention‑Decay mechanism. The framework aligns explicit and implicit pathways through multi‑level distillation, ensuring logical consistency, and allows dynamic reasoning depth by terminating the latent thinking phase based on query complexity. On the GSM8k‑Aug benchmark, Sep‑Latent achieves 56.8% accuracy with an average of only 5.4 tokens, outperforming prior fixed‑length implicit models in efficiency while narrowing the gap with explicit Chain‑of‑Thought methods.

By Yinlong Xu, Jianfeng Huang, Zhengdong Zhou, Mingjie Lin, Fuyu Lv, Dan Ou, Hongxia Xu, Jian Wu
arXiv AI
Oct 16

Does Latent Chain-of-Thought Actually Reason? A Single, Unifying Taxonomy for Latent Reasoning

The paper investigates whether latent chain-of-thought (latent CoT) models truly perform reasoning by examining twenty-one model-task configurations across different training recipes, tasks, and backbones. Using chain deletion, content replacement, probes, and trajectory analysis, the authors find that on logical tasks the latent chain often contains an answer before the chain starts and can be deleted with little effect, while on arithmetic tasks the chain’s content is essential. The study introduces a taxonomy that distinguishes what a chain represents from how a model uses it, clarifying that readable latent states alone do not prove reasoning.

By Jingjie Qiu, Sheldon Yu, Xunyi Jiang, Jiajin Liu, Zihan Huang, Zhendong Chu, Tong Yu, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu