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LightThinker: Thinking Step-by-Step Compression

Jintian Zhang, Yuqi Zhu, Mengshu Sun, Yujie Luo, Shuofei Qiao, Lun Du, Da Zheng, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang

Compresses segments of a generated reasoning chain into dense states while retaining a stepwise inference process.

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arXiv:2502.15589 · Initial submission: 2025-02-21

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Internalized reasoning — Learn from worked solutions so that some or all of the reasoning can later happen without writing those steps. Training may use a separate teacher model or progressively remove written steps from the model being trained.

Continuous-state reasoning — Use vectors—lists of numbers—to carry intermediate reasoning from one step to the next, instead of selecting a text token at every step. Some methods use the model's hidden states; others combine several candidate token representations.

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