Latent Reasoning

Follow this topic Ask about this topic

Latest papers 69

14 papers in the last four weeks, up 367% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

All topics

SLPO: Scaling Latent Reasoning via a Surrogate Policy
Jul 22, 2026Runyang You, Zhiyuan Liu, Yongqi Li +1Reinforcement Learning RL for Language Model Reasoning
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · Sichuan University · Work done as an intern at PolyU.
LatentMT: Machine Translation with Latent Reasoning
Jul 21, 2026Wei-Rui Chen, Samar M. Magdy, Chiyu Zhang +3Low-Resource MT Efficient Language Model Inference
The University of British Columbia · Arizona State University · Rice University +1
Training Continuous Chain of Thought Models: A Tale of Two Regimes
Jul 18, 2026Varun Yerram, He He, Eunsol ChoiCoT Reasoning Continuous Latent Reasoning
Center for Data Science, New York University
T^2MLR: Transformer with Temporal Middle-Layer Recurrence
Jul 16, 2026Ziyang Cai, Xingyu Zhu, Yihe Dong +2Recurrent Transformers LLM Reasoning
Princeton Language and Intelligence, Department of Computer Science Princeton University
Final Checkpoints Are Not Enough: Analyzing Latent Reasoning Faithfulness Along Training Trajectories
Jul 7, 2026Hengyu Jin, Shu Yang, Di WangCoT Faithfulness Continuous Latent Reasoning
Tongji University · Provable Responsible AI and Data Analytics (PRADA) Lab · King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
Multimodal Continuous Reasoning via Asymmetric Mutual Variational Learning
Jul 1, 2026Shijie Li, Yilin Gao, Siyuan Yang +7Multimodal Large Language Models Latent Visual Reasoning
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Ant Group
Why Struggle with Continuous Latents? Interpretable Discrete Latent Reasoning via Rendered Compression
Jun 29, 2026Shuochen Chang, Qingyang Liu, Shaobo Wang +8LLM Interpretability Efficient Language Model Reasoning
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Tongji University
Invariant Reasoning Directions in Latent Trajectories of Language Models
Jun 28, 2026Arun Vignesh Malarkkan, Manan Roy Choudhury, Utkarsh Byahut +3Reasoning Consistency in Language Models Implicit Reasoning in Language Models
Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona.
Learning to Refine Hidden States for Reliable LLM Reasoning
Jun 16, 2026Chia-Hsuan Hsu, Jui-Ming YaoRL for Language Model Reasoning Efficient Language Model Reasoning
Tyler: Typed Latent Reasoning for Language Models -- When to Think, What to Compute, and How Much to Allocate
Jun 15, 2026Hanyu Lin, Min Cai, Jiawei Wen +1Language Model Decoding Efficient Language Model Reasoning
1Shenzhen University · University of Alberta
Latent Thought Flow: Efficient Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models
Jun 15, 2026Xiandong Zou, Jing Huang, Jianshu Li +1RL for Language Model Reasoning Efficient Language Model Reasoning
Singapore Management University · Ant Group
LaME: Learning to Think in Latent Space for Multimodal Embedding via Information Bottleneck
Jun 11, 2026Peixi Wu, Biao Yang, Feipeng Ma +7Efficient Multimodal Inference Multimodal Embedding
University of Science and Technology of China · 2Kuaishou Technology · 3Zhejiang University +1
Observable Patterns Are Not Explanations: A Causal-Geometric Analysis of Latent Reasoning Models
Jun 10, 2026Darpan Aswal, Thomas Palmeira Ferraz, Yongxin Zhou +1Continuous Latent Reasoning Causal Interpretability
Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LIG · Université Paris-Saclay · NAVER LABS Europe
Dropout-GRPO: Variational Stochasticity for Continuous Latent Reasoning
Jun 8, 2026Wooil JungRL for Language Model Reasoning Group Relative Policy Optimization
Why Limit the Residual Stream to Layers and Not Tokens? Persistent Memory for Continuous Latent Reasoning
Jun 5, 2026Mujtaba Farhan, Maheep ChaudharyMemory-Augmented Language Models Persistent Memory for Language Models
1Algoverse AI Research · 2Independent
Continuous Audio Thinking for Large Audio Language Models
Jun 5, 2026Gyojin Han, Dong-Jae Lee, Changho Choi +2Audio Reasoning Audio Understanding
KAIST, South Korea
Latent Reasoning with Normalizing Flows
Jun 4, 2026Guancheng Tu, Xiangjun Fu, Suhao Yu +5Normalizing Flows Continuous Latent Reasoning
University of Pennsylvania · UC San Diego · Meta
Closing the Loop on Latent Reasoning via Test-Time Reconstruction
Jun 4, 2026Xiaopeng Yuan, Haibo Jin, Ye Yu +4LLM Inference Test-Time Training
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Google · Florida State University
TARPO: Token-Wise Latent-Explicit Reasoning via Action-Routing Policy Optimization
Jun 4, 2026Liting Zhang, Shiwan Zhao, Xuyang Zhao +3RL for Language Model Reasoning RL Fine-Tuning
TMCC, College of Computer Science, Nankai University, Tianjin, China
Geometric Latent Reasoning Induces Shorter Generations in LLMs
Jun 1, 2026Shashi Kumar, Yacouba Kaloga, Petr Motlicek +2Efficient Language Model Reasoning Continuous Latent Reasoning
Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland · EPFL, Switzerland · BUT, Czech Republic
Unlocking the Black Box of Latent Reasoning: An Interpretability-Guided Approach to Intervention
May 31, 2026Shuochen Chang, Tong Bai, Xiaofeng Zhang +5LLM Interpretability Causal Interventions in Language Models
1Shanghai Jiao Tong University · 2Fudan University
LaSR: Context-Aware Speech Recognition via Latent Reasoning
May 30, 2026Heyang Liu, Ziyang Cheng, Jiayi Huang +5Automatic Speech Recognition Speech Language Models
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Ant Group
Unlocking the Working Memory of Large Language Models for Latent Reasoning
May 28, 2026Lukas Aichberger, Sepp HochreiterMemory-Augmented Language Models Efficient Language Model Reasoning
ELLIS Unit Linz and LIT AI Lab, Institute for Machine Learning, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria · NXAI GmbH, Linz, Austria
Robust and Efficient Guardrails with Latent Reasoning
May 27, 2026Siddharth Sai, Xiaofei Wen, Muhao ChenLLM Guardrails Content Moderation
University of California, Davis
Stabilizing Recurrent Dynamics for Test-Time Scalable Latent Reasoning in Looped Language Models
May 26, 2026Xiao-Wen Yang, Ziyu Han, Xi-Hua Zhang +4Latent Dynamics Modeling Test-Time Scaling
State Key Laboratory of Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China · School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
Selective Latent Thinking: Adaptive Compression of LLM Reasoning Chains
May 25, 2026Hui Xie, Jie Liu, Ziyue Qiao +1Efficient Language Model Reasoning LLM Inference Acceleration
Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands · School of Computing and Information Technology, Great Bay University, China
Equilibrium Reasoners: Learning Attractors Enables Scalable Reasoning
May 20, 2026Benhao Huang, Zhengyang Geng, Zico KolterDynamical Systems Test-Time Scaling
CMU
LPG: Balancing Efficiency and Policy Reasoning in Latent Policy Guardrails
May 17, 2026Nanxi Li, Zhengyue Zhao, Chaowei XiaoLanguage Model Safety Evaluation LLM Guardrails
Johns Hopkins University
LaTER: Efficient Test-Time Reasoning via Latent Exploration and Explicit Verification
May 8, 2026Xuan Li, Yining Wang, Yuchen Liu +7CoT Reasoning Efficient Language Model Reasoning
University of Science and Technology of China · Unisound AI Technology Co., Ltd · MAIS, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences
LatentRAG: Latent Reasoning and Retrieval for Efficient Agentic RAG
May 7, 2026Yijia Zheng, Marcel WorringLLM Inference Acceleration Agentic RAG
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Jul 22, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save

SLPO: Scaling Latent Reasoning via a Surrogate Policy

Runyang You, Zhiyuan Liu, Yongqi Li, Wenjie Li

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · Sichuan University · Work done as an intern at PolyU.

Reinforcement Learning RL for Language Model Reasoning Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards Continuous Latent Reasoning Adaptive Computation Latent Reasoning

Open paper AskPDF arXiv

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become the predominant recipe for eliciting test-time scaling in explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoners. Yet this scaling path remains computationally costly, since every intermediate step must be decoded as a language token. Latent reasoning instead carries intermediate computation as continuous vectors and already matches or surpasses explicit CoT at far shorter horizons. Despite this promise, latent reasoners remain largely imitation-bound, while explicit CoT has already moved past imitation via outcome-reward RL. Latent trajectories lack a tractable per-step likelihood and an adaptive stopping interface under fixed thinking budgets, so outcome rewards cannot elicit latent test-time scaling. We introduce Surrogate Latent Policy Optimization (SLPO) to bring outcome-reward RL to autoregressive latent reasoners: an empirical surrogate policy density over latent transitions for trajectory-level credit assignment, and a correctness-supervised stopping head that outcome-reward optimization refines into a variable-horizon policy. Across continuous and soft thinking settings, SLPO improves Pass@

k

under parallel sampling and allocates longer latent computation to harder instances with higher deterministic accuracy.