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Seek in the Dark: Reasoning via Test-Time Instance-Level Policy Gradient in Latent Space

Hengli Li, Chenxi Li, Tong Wu, Xuekai Zhu, Yuxuan Wang, Zhaoxin Yu, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Song-Chun Zhu, Zixia Jia, Ying Nian Wu, Zilong Zheng

Optimizes latent states for individual problems at test time using policy gradients rather than searching over written reasoning traces.

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arXiv:2505.13308 · Initial submission: 2025-05-19

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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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