Large language models often improve reasoning by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT), demonstrating the importance of intermediate computation. However, textual CoT forces this computation through a discrete, serial, and communication-oriented token stream: each reasoning step must be verbalized before the model can proceed, even when the underlying update is semantic, uncertain, or only partially formed.
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: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...
By Xinghao Chen, Anhao Zhao, Heming Xia, Xuan Lu, Hanlin Wang, Yanjun Chen, Wei Zhang, Jian Wang, Wenjie Li, Xiaoyu Shen
arXiv:2606. 16222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on intermediate reasoning, yet explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) suffers from a linguistic space bottleneck: each thought must be decoded into tokens, causing high inference overhead.
By Xiandong Zou, Jing Huang, Jianshu Li, Pan Zhou
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: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: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...
By Yuwen Hao, Menglin Yang
arXiv:2608. 13570v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent reasoning has emerged as a powerful alternative to text-based Chain-of-Thought (CoT), offering significant gains in computational efficiency by compressing verbose reasoning into compact embeddings.
By Dayuan Zhao, Shengcao Cao, Yu-Xiong Wang, Liang-Yan Gui
arXiv:2608. 08113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has become the dominant paradigm for eliciting reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it creates substantial computational overhead by forcing models to externalize intermediate reasoning steps as discrete tokens.
By Abhishek Panwar, Maheep Singh, Saksham Bansal
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.
By Xiaoang Xu, Siyuan Liu, Shuo Wang, Junlan Feng, Fanyu Meng, Zhu Zhang, Jixun Wang, Xiaorong Wang, Zihan Zhou, Xin Li, Chaojun Xiao, Yiming Zhang, Huijia Wu, Liuyu Xiang, Peipei Li, Zhaofeng He
The paper introduces Prototype-Mediated Process Supervision (PMPS), a method that uses learnable reasoning prototypes to provide structural supervision for latent chain-of-thought embeddings, addressing representation collapse and uneven information distribution. PMPS aligns latent and explicit CoT embeddings in a shared prototype space via many-to-many soft assignment and employs a Progressive Sequential Alignment module to guide training from positional priors to adaptive matching. Experiments show PMPS reduces output token length to under 50% of explicit CoT on GSM8K-Aug and improves accuracy by 2.08% over SIM-CoT, even surpassing CoT-SFT on GPT-2 and achieving the highest accuracy among latent reasoning methods on larger models and harder tasks.
By Yiqi Li, Xu Chen, Chen Ju, Jiangchao Yao, Zhaoyang Li, Jinsong Lan, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng, Yu Wang
arXiv:2606.13061v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Reasoning-driven universal multimodal embedding has advanced rapidly by introducing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into the embedding pipeline. D...
By Peixi Wu, Biao Yang, Feipeng Ma, Bosong Chai, Bo Lin, Wei Yuan, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Hebei Li, Xiaoyan Sun