LLoCoT：用循环 Transformer 实现非自回归潜在推理

View PDF HTML (experimental)

Abstract:Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning often improves language-model performance by giving models additional computation before answering. However, explicit CoT expresses this computation as a sequence of autoregressively generated tokens. Latent reasoning replaces these tokens with compact continuous states, but most autoregressive latent-reasoning methods retain a left-to-right dependency among latent vectors. We introduce LLoCoT: a looped latent-reasoning framework that replaces left-to-right latent generation with iterative refinement of a compact latent workspace. A shared transformer is reapplied for a small number of refinement iterations, jointly updating the latent slots based on the prompt and the evolving workspace state. Using the refined state, a probabilistic head predicts a distribution from which latent tokens are sampled in parallel and used to condition an autoregressive decoder for answer generation. Training uses continuous representations derived from explicit CoT together with a final-answer prediction loss and likelihood-based supervision of the latent states. Across HumanEval and MBPP, LLoCoT achieves the highest mean among the evaluated methods, performing on par in accuracy with Reasoning SFT, our explicit-CoT baseline, while outperforming the base model, answer-only SFT and NF-CoT. Relative to Reasoning SFT, LLoCoT reduces time to the first answer token by approximately $36\times$ and reasoning-phase latency by approximately $42\times$, while increasing end-to-end throughput by $9.2\%$. This design replaces serial thought generation with parallel latent-slot refinement while retaining probabilistic latent modeling and autoregressive answer decoding.

Submission history

From: Arnau Padrés Masdemont [view email]
[v1] Thu, 8 Oct 2026 08:21:31 UTC (182 KB)