arXiv AI

Fluid Reasoning Representations

arXiv:2602. 04843v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier large language models increasingly solve complex tasks involving abstract concepts through extended test-time thinking.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

Beneath the Surface of Chains-of-Thought: A Mechanistic Interpretation of Reasoning Operations in LLMs

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
arXiv AI
6d ago

Can Linguistic Reasoning Vectors Enhance Multimodal Reasoning Ability?

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 AI
Sep 2

Latent Recurrent Thoughts: Recurrent Refinement of Proposed Latents for Reasoning with Frozen LLMs

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 AI
Jun 2

eMoT: evolving Memory-of-Thought via Symbolic Anchoring and Memory Corrosion

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
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Aha-Flow Distillation: Flow Markers Matter in LLM Reasoning

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