Awesome-Latent-CoT

Awesome-Latent-CoT

This repository contains a regularly updated paper list for LLMs-reasoning-in-latent-space.

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This repository contains a regularly updated paper list for Large Language Models (LLMs) reasoning in latent space. Reasoning in latent space allows for more flexible and efficient thought representation beyond language tokens, bringing AI closer to human-like cognition. The repository covers various aspects of LLMs, including pre-training, supervised finetuning, analysis, interpretability, multimodal reasoning, and applications. It aims to showcase the advancements in reasoning with latent thoughts and continuous concepts in AI models.

README:

Large Language Models: Reasoning in Latent Space

The continuous latent space is analogous to the superposition states in Hilbert space in quantum mechanics. Discretizing it into tokens is akin to measurement collapsing the superposition into a definite outcome.

This repository contains a regularly updated paper list for LLMs-reasoning-in-latent-space.

Reasoning in latent space shifts the way AI models think, moving beyond language tokens to represent thought processes in a more abstract, non-language space. Just as humans often think without words, latent space allows for more flexible and efficient reasoning.

Key advantages include:

  1. Richer Thought Representation: Latent space captures complex, non-verbal thoughts that language alone can't express.
  2. Lower Latency: It allows for higher information density, reducing the need for token-based decoding and speeding up reasoning.

This approach brings AI closer to human-like cognition, enabling faster, more flexible, and powerful models for real-world tasks.

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Content

Keywords Convention

Abbreviation

Conference

Main Features

Papers

Pre-training and Continue Pre-training

  • Think before you speak: Training language models with pause tokens
    Sachin Goyal,Ziwei Ji, Ankit Singh Rawat, Aditya Krishna Menon, Sanjiv Kumar, Vaishnavh Nagarajan. [pdf], 2023.10.
  • Quiet-STaR: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Think Before Speaking
    Eric Zelikman, Georges Harik, Yijia Shao, Varuna Jayasiri, Nick Haber, Noah D. Goodman. [pdf], 2024.03.
  • Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approach
    Jonas Geiping, Sean McLeish, Neel Jain, John Kirchenbauer, Siddharth Singh, Brian R. Bartoldson, Bhavya Kailkhura, Abhinav Bhatele, Tom Goldstein. [pdf], [code], [model], 2025.02.
  • LLM Pretraining with Continuous Concepts
    Jihoon Tack, Jack Lanchantin, Jane Yu, Andrew Cohen, Ilia Kulikov, Janice Lan, Shibo Hao, Yuandong Tian, Jason Weston, Xian Li. [pdf], [code], 2025.02.
  • Inner Thinking Transformer: Leveraging Dynamic Depth Scaling to Foster Adaptive Internal Thinking
    Yilong Chen, Junyuan Shang, Zhenyu Zhang, Yanxi Xie, Jiawei Sheng, Tingwen Liu, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang. [pdf], 2025.02.
  • Scalable Language Models with Posterior Inference of Latent Thought Vectors
    Deqian Kong, Minglu Zhao, Dehong Xu, Bo Pang, Shu Wang, Edouardo Honig, Zhangzhang Si, Chuan Li, Jianwen Xie, Sirui Xie, Ying Nian Wu. [pdf], 2025.02.

Supervised-Finetuning

Vertical Level

  • Implicit Chain of Thought Reasoning via Knowledge Distillation
    Yuntian Deng, Kiran Prasad, Roland Fernandez, Paul Smolensky, Vishrav Chaudhary, Stuart Shieber. [pdf], [code], 2023.11.
  • Diffusion of Thoughts: Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models
    Jiacheng Ye, Shansan Gong, Liheng Chen, Lin Zheng, Jiahui Gao, Han Shi, Chuan Wu, Xin Jiang, Zhenguo Li, Wei Bi, Lingpeng Kong. [pdf], 2024.02.
  • From Explicit CoT to Implicit CoT: Learning to Internalize CoT Step by Step
    Yuntian Deng, Yejin Choi, Stuart Shieber. [pdf], [code], 2024.05.
  • Distilling System 2 into System 1
    Ping Yu, Jing Xu, Jason Weston, Ilia Kulikov. [pdf], 2024.06.
  • Enhancing Auto-regressive Chain-of-Thought through Loop-Aligned Reasoning
    Qifan Yu, Zhenyu He, Sijie Li, Xun Zhou, Jun Zhang, Jingjing Xu, Di He. [pdf], [code], 2025.02.

Horizontal Level

Discrete Tokens
  • Guiding Language Model Reasoning with Planning Tokens
    Xinyi Wang, Lucas Caccia, Oleksiy Ostapenko, Xingdi Yuan, William Yang Wang, Alessandro Sordoni. [pdf], [code], 2023.10.
  • Let's think dot by dot: Hidden computation in transformer language models
    Jacob Pfau, William Merrill, Samuel R. Bowman. [pdf], [code], 2024.04.
  • Disentangling Memory and Reasoning Ability in Large Language Models
    Mingyu Jin, Weidi Luo, Sitao Cheng, Xinyi Wang, Wenyue Hua, Ruixiang Tang, William Yang Wang, Yongfeng Zhang. [pdf], [code], 2024.11.
  • Token Assorted: Mixing Latent and Text Tokens for Improved Language Model Reasoning
    DiJia Su, Hanlin Zhu, Yingchen Xu, Jiantao Jiao, Yuandong Tian, Qinqing Zheng. [pdf], 2025.02.
Continuous Tokens
  • Expediting and Elevating Large Language Model Reasoning via Hidden Chain-of-Thought Decoding
    Tianqiao Liu, Zui Chen, Zitao Liu, Mi Tian, Weiqi Luo. [pdf], 2024.09.
  • Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space
    Shibo Hao, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, DiJia Su, Xian Li, Zhiting Hu, Jason Weston, Yuandong Tian. [pdf], [code], 2024.12.
  • Compressed Chain of Thought: Efficient Reasoning Through Dense Representations
    Jeffrey Cheng, Benjamin Van Durme. [pdf], 2024.12.
  • SoftCoT: Soft Chain-of-Thought for Efficient Reasoning with LLMs
    Yige Xu, Xu Guo, Zhiwei Zeng, Chunyan Miao. [pdf], 2025.02.
  • LightThinker: Thinking Step-by-Step Compression
    Jintian Zhang, Yuqi Zhu, Mengshu Sun, Yujie Luo, Shuofei Qiao, Lun Du, Da Zheng, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang. [pdf], 2025.02.
  • CODI: Compressing Chain-of-Thought into Continuous Space via Self-Distillation
    Zhenyi Shen, Hanqi Yan, Linhai Zhang, Zhanghao Hu, Yali Du, Yulan He. [pdf], 2025.02.

Analysis and Interpretability

  • Do LLMs Really Think Step-by-step In Implicit Reasoning?
    Yijiong Yu. [pdf], [code], 2024.11.
  • The Semantic Hub Hypothesis: Language Models Share Semantic Representations Across Languages and Modalities
    Zhaofeng Wu, Xinyan Velocity Yu, Dani Yogatama, Jiasen Lu, Yoon Kim. [pdf], [code] 2024.11.
  • Reasoning with Latent Thoughts: On the Power of Looped Transformers
    Nikunj Saunshi, Nishanth Dikkala, Zhiyuan Li, Sashank J. Reddi, Sanjiv Kumar. [pdf], 2025.01.
  • Implicit Reasoning in Transformers is Reasoning through Shortcuts
    Tianhe Lin, Jian Xie, Siyu Yuan, Deqing Yang. [pdf], 2025.03.

Multimodal Latent Reasoning

  • Multi-modal latent space learning for chain-of-thought reasoning in language models
    Liqi He, Zuchao Li, Xiantao Cai, Ping Wang. [pdf], [code], 2023.12.
  • Multimodal Latent Language Modeling with Next-Token Diffusion
    Yutao Sun, Hangbo Bao, Wenhui Wang, Zhiliang Peng, Li Dong, Shaohan Huang, Jianyong Wang, Furu Wei. [pdf], 2024.12.
  • Efficient Reasoning with Hidden Thinking
    Xuan Shen, Yizhou Wang, Xiangxi Shi, Yanzhi Wang, Pu Zhao, Jiuxiang Gu. [pdf], [code], 2025.01.

Applications

  • Learning More Effective Representations for Dense Retrieval through Deliberate Thinking Before Search Yifan Ji, Zhipeng Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Shi Yu, Yishan Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun. [pdf], 2025.02.

Other related work or pending to be specified

  • Language Models are Hidden Reasoners: Unlocking Latent Reasoning Capabilities via Self-Rewarding
    Haolin Chen, Yihao Feng, Zuxin Liu, Weiran Yao, Akshara Prabhakar, Shelby Heinecke, Ricky Ho, Phil Mui, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Huan Wang. [pdf], [code], 2024.11.
  • Searching Latent Program Spaces
    Clément Bonnet, Matthew V Macfarlane. [pdf], [code], 2024.11.
  • Deliberation in Latent Space via Differentiable Cache Augmentation
    Luyang Liu, Jonas Pfeiffer, Jiaxing Wu, Jun Xie, Arthur Szlam. [pdf], 2024.12.
  • Large Concept Models: Language Modeling in a Sentence Representation Space
    LCM team, Loïc Barrault, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Maha Elbayad, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Belen Alastruey, Pierre Andrews, Mariano Coria, Guillaume Couairon, Marta R. Costa-jussà, David Dale, Hady Elsahar, Kevin Heffernan, João Maria Janeiro, Tuan Tran, Christophe Ropers, Eduardo Sánchez, Robin San Roman, Alexandre Mourachko, Safiyyah Saleem, Holger Schwenk. [pdf], [code], 2024.12.
  • Beyond Words: A Latent Memory Approach to Internal Reasoning in LLMs
    José I. Orlicki. [pdf], 2025.02.

Resources

For most recent Efficient Reasoning research, see Awesome-Efficient-Reasoning.

Acknowledgements

If I’ve accidentally missed your papers on the list, please reach out to me, and I’ll make sure to add them as soon as possible!

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