arXiv:2606. 07410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The emergence of "Aha moments" in large language models, particularly DeepSeek-R1-0120, has raised the question of whether these systems genuinely reason or merely imitate the appearance of reasoning.
By Yuxiang Chen, Jun Wang
arXiv:2607. 22629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) produce long, explicit chains of intermediate steps before generating a final answer at inference time.
By Durgesh Kalwar, Vardhan Palod, Subbarao Kambhampati
arXiv:2609.16055v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Test-time compute has emerged as a major approach to improving the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing test-time reasonin...
By Zhiren Gong, Yikun Hou, Zihao Zeng, Ming Xiao, Chau Yuen, Wei Yang Bryan Lim
The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) organize reasoning operations—such as problem formulation, goal decomposition, and deduction—within their hidden representation spaces. It shows that these operations are separable in held‑out representations, with peak separability in middle layers, and that token‑wise alignment of operations becomes more distributed across spans as layers deepen. Attention‑masking experiments reveal that representations aligned to operations at chunk onsets depend on prior reasoning context, indicating a geometric correspondence between linguistic reasoning expressions and internal model structure.
By Seogyeong Jeong, Jaehui Hwang, Dongyoon Han, Geonmo Gu, Alice Oh, Taekyung Kim
The paper introduces LIFT, a lightweight vector‑intervention technique that transfers reasoning capability from a base large language model (LLM) to a vision‑language model (VLM) without retraining the VLM backbone. LIFT defines Reasoning Vectors as differences in hidden states between a reasoning path with an explicit trace and a solver path without it, and injects these vectors into the VLM’s language‑side activations. Experiments on two VLMs across six reasoning benchmarks show that vectors derived from the base LLM consistently outperform those derived from the aligned VLM, indicating that the base LLM is a more effective source for recovering degraded reasoning.
"whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that a simple, frozen‑backbone intervention can partially restore reasoning abilities in multimodal models, highlighting the value of leveraging the original language model’s reasoning power."
By Ziyi Wang, Li Li, Aolin Zhou, Yankun Shen, Chonghan Liu, Shuxia Lin, Xu Yang
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. 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
arXiv:2608.21265v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models often rely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex tasks, but verbose reasoning traces introduce substantial inferen...
By Simeng Zhang, Yilong Chen, Wenyuan Zhang, Zhenyu Zhang, Yao Chen, Junyuan Shang, Tingwen Liu
Latent Recurrent Thoughts (LRT) proposes a method for reasoning with frozen large language models by operating in the model’s continuous representation space. A small auxiliary network generates initial latent vectors, which a tiny recurrent reasoner refines over multiple steps, decoupling computational depth from model size. Experiments on symbolic and natural‑language reasoning tasks show that LRT outperforms prior frozen‑decoder continuous‑space methods and chain‑of‑thought prompting while using far less inference compute.
By Zhaoliang Chen, Jie Fu
arXiv:2606. 02054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance on multi-step reasoning tasks, their reliability is persistently hindered by critical limitations such as unconstrained hallucinations and poor numerical computation.
By Xiang Li, Jiwei Wei, Ke Liu, Yitong Qin, Jinyu Guo, Malu Zhang, Peng Wang, Yang Yang
The paper introduces the Flow Moment, a reasoning pattern marked by sustained, process‑confirming verbalizations, contrasting with the revision‑oriented Aha Moment. It proposes Flow‑CoT, a rewritten version of reasoning traces that preserves content while highlighting Flow Markers, and uses it as auxiliary supervision in on‑policy self‑distillation (OPSD). The authors further present Aha‑Flow Distillation (AFD), a dual‑mode extension of OPSD that pairs concise solution‑based supervision (Aha branch) with rewritten Flow‑CoT under a confident reasoning instruction (Flow branch). Experiments on AIME25 and HMMT25 with Qwen3‑8B and Qwen3‑4B models show consistent performance gains, and controlled ablations confirm that the dual‑mode training structure contributes to the improvement.
By Xiaodong Wang, Peixi Peng
arXiv:2607. 16097v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to improving large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks, yet RL post-training is largely studied in isolation from the pretraining that precedes it.
By Jingyan Shen, Ang Li, Salman Rahman, Yifan Sun, Micah Goldblum, Matus Telgarsky, Pavel Izmailov