arXiv:2604. 07822v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study implicit reasoning, i.
By Harsh Kohli, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Huan Sun, Yuekun Yao
Large language models can solve complex multi‑hop tasks but often fail on simple two‑hop queries, even when each hop is individually correct. In a controlled symbolic setting, the authors find that models generalize reliably when the second hop follows the training distribution, but always fail when it deviates. Mechanistic analysis shows that successful generalization relies on consistent intermediate representations across contexts, whereas failures arise from a mismatch between lower‑layer representation construction and upper‑layer mapping to outputs. The study proposes a recurrent‑style training strategy that improves out‑of‑distribution two‑hop generalization.
By Zili Zhang, Yilin Wang, Heng Wang, Herun Wan, Minnan Luo
arXiv:2603.21676v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Standard Transformers have a fixed computational depth, limiting their ability to generalize to tasks that require variable-depth reasoning....
By Hung-Hsuan Chen
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
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:2607. 15178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer reasoning is limited by autoregressive decoding, which repeat edly compresses rich hidden computation through token space and makes it difficult for intermediate reasoning states to persist across time.
By Ziyang Cai, Xingyu Zhu, Yihe Dong, Yinghui He, Sanjeev Arora