arXiv:2609.22228v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language models increasingly rely on long chain-of-thought (CoT) trajectories for complex reasoning, but autoregressive generation brings subst...
By Shaolong Chen, Ang Li, Mingjie Li, Yisen Wang
arXiv:2604.23351v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Whether intermediate reasoning is computationally useful or merely explanatory depends on whether chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens contain task-...
By Houman Mehrafarin, Amit Parekh, Ioannis Konstas
arXiv:2601.08058v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting often improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), but the internal signal that trigg...
By Zhenghao He, Guangzhi Xiong, Bohan Liu, Sanchit Sinha, Aidong Zhang
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:2607. 11266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it often incurs substantial computational costs due to over-reasoning: the generation of redundant, verbose, or irrelevant steps.
By Daeyeop Lee, Hwanjo Yu
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
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:2412.06769v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are typically constrained to reason in the language space, where they express the reasoning process through a chain-of...
By Shibo Hao, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, DiJia Su, Xian Li, Zhiting Hu, Jason Weston, Yuandong Tian
arXiv:2505.16782v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on complex tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, conventional CoT...
By Xinghao Chen, Anhao Zhao, Heming Xia, Xuan Lu, Hanlin Wang, Yanjun Chen, Wei Zhang, Jian Wang, Wenjie Li, Xiaoyu Shen
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
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
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