The paper introduces Discrete Latent Reasoning (DLR), a method that transforms continuous latent states into explicit discrete tokens by rendering textual chains of thought into images, extracting visual features, and clustering them to build a discrete latent vocabulary. DLR enables standard autoregressive modeling over both natural language and latent tokens, supporting pretraining alignment, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Experiments on five reasoning benchmarks and two model series (Qwen3‑VL and LLaMA‑3) show that DLR outperforms prior latent reasoning baselines with up to 20× compression while preserving interpretable semantic structure.
By Shuochen Chang, Qingyang Liu, Shaobo Wang, Bingjie Gao, Qianli Ma, Haonan Zhao, Yibo Miao, Yulin Sun, Zelin Peng, Jiangtong Li, Li Niu
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
SLVR (Structured Latent Visual Reasoning) is a training framework that blends explicit chain-of-thought with latent reasoning for multimodal large language models. It organizes reasoning into typed latent stages—planning, grounding, evidence selection, and integration—each supervised by corresponding signals such as plans, bounding boxes, visual evidence, and final rationales. Built on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B, SLVR consistently improves performance on multimodal reasoning benchmarks, achieving significant gains on MMVP, BLINK Relation, V*, MathVista, and ChartQA.
By Albert Gao, Bing Xue, Andrea Zanette
arXiv:2610.19871v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Sampling multiple chain-of-thought rationales from a language model can uncover correct solutions missed by a single attempt. However, these rationales...
By Mingyeong Kim, Gyusang Cho, Juho Lee, Giung Nam
arXiv:2604. 09757v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Medical vision--language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential for medical visual question answering (VQA), yet their reasoning remains largely text-centric: images are encoded once as static context, and subsequent inference is dominated by language.
By Suyang Xi, Songtao Hu, Yuxiang Lai, Wangyun Dan, Yaqi Liu, Shansong Wang, Xiaofeng Yang
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
ReGuLaR introduces a relation‑grounded latent reasoning framework for large vision‑language models, explicitly anchoring latent states to key objects and their inter‑object relations. It employs a training‑time ReGFormer to focus reasoning on question‑relevant visual evidence, while inference proceeds without the ReGFormer. The authors also create the RGROUNDING‑351K dataset and demonstrate that ReGuLaR outperforms existing methods across diverse benchmarks, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results.
By Zihu Wang, Karthik Somayaji N. S, Hejia Geng, Peng Li
arXiv:2604.07518v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Vision-Language Models often struggle with complex visual reasoning due to the visual information loss in textual CoT. Existing methods either add...
By Mengdan Zhu, Senhao Cheng, Liang Zhao
arXiv:2606. 06252v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work moves intermediate reasoning from natural-language traces into latent or cache-level representations to reduce token overhead and avoid a discrete communication bottleneck.
By Xiaopeng Yuan, Haibo Jin, Ye Yu, Peng Kuang, Lijun Yu, Yushun Dong, Haohan Wang
arXiv:2606. 20075v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent Chain-of-Thought (CoT) internalizes reasoning within continuous hidden states, offering a promising alternative to verbose discrete reasoning traces.
By Xinghao Chen, Chak Tou Leong, Wenjin Guo, Jian Wang, Wenjie Li, Xiaoyu Shen
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:2605.08802v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Due to the potential for exploratory reasoning of Latent Visual Reasoning, recent works tend to enable MLLMs (Multimodal Large Language Models) to...
By Ziyang Ding, Linjian Meng, Yiming Wu, Yuhan Li, Yuhao Liu, Zhen Zhao