# Internal Chain-of-Thought: Empirical Evidence for Layer-wise Subtask Scheduling in LLMs

Authors: Zhipeng Yang, Junzhuo Li, Siyu Xia, Xuming Hu.

Presents evidence that transformer layers schedule intermediate subtasks internally, offering a layer-wise view of implicit reasoning.

First public: 2025-05-20.
ArXiv initial submission: 2025-05-20.

[Original paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14530) · [Reading-list entry](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2505.14530/)
[Preprint BibTeX](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2505.14530/citation.bib) · [Preprint CSL-JSON](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2505.14530/citation.csl.json) · [JSON record](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2505.14530/record.json)
[Code](https://github.com/yzp11/Internal-Chain-of-Thought)

## Approaches

- [Analysis and evaluation](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/topics/implicit-reasoning-evaluation/): Measure how well these methods work, investigate what their internal computation does, and identify where they fail. This includes experiments, studies of model internals, and mathematical results.

Summary and categories are editorial. Read the original paper to verify claims and limitations. A citation to a paper does not, by itself, establish that a later method builds on it.

Reading-list version 0.9.5; literature checked through 2026-10-18.