arXiv:2602. 07075v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current chemical large language models (LLMs) predominantly rely on explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to solve complex reasoning problems.
Large language models offer a promising foundation for chemical reasoning, bringing together chemical knowledge and multistep problem solving. Chemical intuition can provide an initial sense of plausi...
Latent JEPA is a new framework that trains continuous latent thoughts to anticipate informative aspects of future solutions in chemical reasoning, without verbalizing every intermediate step. It combines autoregressive learning with joint-embedding prediction of one or more future views, using textual and molecular prediction objectives that link latent thoughts to subsequent reasoning and molecular outcomes. Experiments on ChemCoTBench demonstrate improvements in molecular optimization, editing, and reaction metrics, and representation analyses show that future prediction makes latent thoughts more informative about molecular outcomes and better aligned with chemical structure.
arXiv:2505.16782v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on complex tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, conventional CoT...
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.
Chemical reasoning language models are expected to produce faithful chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations when answering chemistry tasks, but across four model families and twelve tasks, hallucinations are widespread and largely independent of answer correctness. Attribution analyses reveal that these models use a shared scratchpad function: Chem‑R and ether‑0 rely on fragmented SMILES drafts, while ChemDFM‑R emphasizes scaffold, positional, and naming cues. Perturbing Chem‑R’s SMILES sketches degrades generation, indicating that structural drafts can be causally load‑bearing even when verbal structural claims are largely inert.
The paper investigates the effectiveness of activation steering in latent chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning compared to explicit CoT. It finds that steering continuous latent thoughts yields weaker impacts on language generation, even when hidden representations are shifted similarly. The authors propose a latent-to-language transition gap, supported by evidence of abrupt output distribution changes at the transition boundary and weaker bidirectional control in latent CoT.
arXiv:2606. 06447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models often improve reasoning by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT), demonstrating the importance of intermediate computation.
arXiv:2604. 06374v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Latent reasoning via continuous chain-of-thoughts (Latent CoT) has emerged as a promising alternative to discrete CoT reasoning.
arXiv:2609.07406v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves the reasoning ability of large language models by introducing intermediate computation, but explicit rational...
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.
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:2606. 31779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models typically reason via explicit chain-of-thought (CoT), generating intermediate steps token-by-token.