A*-Thought-V2 is a framework that models Chain-of-Thought reasoning as a geometric trajectory in a 3D PCA space, using explicit-implicit latent tokens to compress steps that deviate from the main question-to-solution direction. The method measures alignment angles to decide which steps remain text and which become latent, and introduces stepwise embedding forcing and label forcing to train the architecture. Experiments on Qwen models show up to 2.6% accuracy gains, halved response length, and significant reductions in computation and training time.
By Xiaoang Xu, Siyuan Liu, Shuo Wang, Junlan Feng, Fanyu Meng, Zhu Zhang, Jixun Wang, Xiaorong Wang, Zihan Zhou, Xin Li, Chaojun Xiao, Yiming Zhang, Huijia Wu, Liuyu Xiang, Peipei Li, Zhaofeng He
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:2603. 03031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong complex reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning.
By Xuan Yang, Jiayu Liu, Yuhang Lai, Hao Xu, Zhenya Huang, Ning Miao
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: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.
By Baohao Liao, Hanze Dong, Yuhui Xu, Doyen Sahoo, Christof Monz, Junnan Li, Caiming Xiong
arXiv:2607. 01571v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables large language models (LLMs) to solve complex problems by generating intermediate reasoning steps.
By Aria Masoomi, Mahsa Bazzaz, Adel Javanmard, Vahab Mirrokni
arXiv:2608. 08113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has become the dominant paradigm for eliciting reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it creates substantial computational overhead by forcing models to externalize intermediate reasoning steps as discrete tokens.
By Abhishek Panwar, Maheep Singh, Saksham Bansal
arXiv:2606. 09873v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning models achieve strong performance on challenging tasks by generating explicit intermediate reasoning traces before producing a final answer.
By Aditya Sharma, Christopher J. Pal, Amal Zouaq
arXiv:2606. 31779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models typically reason via explicit chain-of-thought (CoT), generating intermediate steps token-by-token.
By Ying Fan, Anej Svete, Kangwook Lee
arXiv:2607. 00341v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models achieve strong performance on many reasoning tasks when allowed to externalize intermediate steps as Chain-of-Thought (CoT).
By Hengyu Fu, Tianyu Guo, Zixuan Wang, Hanlin Zhu, Jason D. Lee, Jiantao Jiao, Stuart Russell, Song Mei
arXiv:2603.21676v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Standard Transformers have a fixed computational depth, limiting their ability to generalize to tasks that require variable-depth reasoning....
By Hung-Hsuan Chen
The paper investigates how transformers acquire deep semantic dependencies, proposing a mechanistic framework that frames learning as a competition between surface statistics and deep semantics. It identifies a "Gradient Starvation" effect that suppresses error signals for sparse semantic dependencies early in training, delaying structural reasoning until a sudden phase transition. The study also explains the success of Chain-of-Thought strategies and introduces a topology‑aligned contrastive objective that improves variable binding performance by more than twice the gain of standard fine‑tuning.
By Jiangrui Zhao, Xiaoting Du