arXiv AI

SuperThoughts: Reasoning Tokens in Superposition

arXiv:2606. 13862v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves LLM problem-solving but is computationally expensive due to sequential token generation.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

Towards Efficient Large Language Reasoning Models via Extreme-Ratio Chain-of-Thought Compression

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.

By Yuntian Tang, Bohan Jia, Wenxuan Huang, Lianyue Zhang, Jiao Xie, Wenxi Li, Wei Li, Jie Hu, Xinghao Chen Rongrong Ji, Shaohui Lin
arXiv AI
Jun 15

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

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 AI
Sep 7

Extremely Sparse Supervision Incentivizes Reasoning Ability

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.

By Zhishuai Liu, Xingzi Xu, Mehmet Saygin Seyfioglu, Pan Xu, Karim Bouyarmane
arXiv AI
Sep 15

How Many Thoughts Can a Vector Hold? The Capacity of Reasoning by Superposition

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
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Penelope: Localized Latent Recurrence for Efficient Structured Reasoning

arXiv:2607. 25915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Complex structured reasoning tasks often require additional computation, yet current language models obtain it mainly by increasing parameter scale or by serializing intermediate steps as chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens.

By Yutong Chen, Shouqian Shi, Xinran Liu, Haochen Wang, Jiaying Wang, Tianxing Xu, Yuanxi Wang, Zirui Ding
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Zipping the Thought: When and How Compressed Reasoning Data Works in LLM Post-Training

The paper investigates how different forms of compressed chain‑of‑thought (CoT) reasoning—Explicit, Composed, and Implicit—affect large language model (LLM) performance after supervised fine‑tuning (SFT). Using a synthetic compositional reasoning task, the authors show that coarser CoT requires more SFT data, that Composed and Implicit CoT benefit more from data scaling (with Composed also benefiting from repetition), and that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can decompose compressed steps learned during SFT. Additionally, unidirectional CoT ordering improves generalization on longer sequential tasks.

By Kohsei Matsutani, Gouki Minegishi, Takeshi Kojima, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo