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. 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
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
Sep‑Latent introduces separator tokens as natural compression anchors for implicit reasoning in large language models, enabling the model to aggregate and compress reasoning logic into these anchors via an Attention‑Decay mechanism. The framework aligns explicit and implicit pathways through multi‑level distillation, ensuring logical consistency, and allows dynamic reasoning depth by terminating the latent thinking phase based on query complexity. On the GSM8k‑Aug benchmark, Sep‑Latent achieves 56.8% accuracy with an average of only 5.4 tokens, outperforming prior fixed‑length implicit models in efficiency while narrowing the gap with explicit Chain‑of‑Thought methods.
By Yinlong Xu, Jianfeng Huang, Zhengdong Zhou, Mingjie Lin, Fuyu Lv, Dan Ou, Hongxia Xu, Jian Wu
INTACT introduces a small external encoder that induces latent reasoning in a frozen backbone model by mapping hidden states to compact continuous representations, called soft-token blocks. The encoder is trained via distillation to mimic written reasoning steps while preserving the backbone’s behavior, and then fine‑tuned for answer correctness. Experiments on four frozen backbones (1B–8B) show that INTACT improves accuracy on GSM8K and other out‑of‑domain benchmarks, reduces latency by up to 19%, and outperforms existing latent‑reasoning baselines at 3B and 8B scales.
By Kutay Tire, Atula Tejaswi, Haris Vikalo, Sujay Sanghavi
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