# Latent Chain-of-Thought as Planning: Decoupling Reasoning from Verbalization

Authors: Jiecong Wang, Hao Peng, Zhanyi Wang, Chunyang Liu, Guanlin Wu.

Separates an internal planning process from verbalization and studies whether the latent plan supports effective downstream reasoning.

First public: 2026-01-29.
ArXiv initial submission: 2026-01-29.

[Original paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21358) · [Reading-list entry](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2601.21358/)
[Preprint BibTeX](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2601.21358/citation.bib) · [Preprint CSL-JSON](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2601.21358/citation.csl.json) · [JSON record](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2601.21358/record.json)
[Code](https://github.com/yunsaijc/PLaT)

## Approaches

- [Continuous-state reasoning](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/topics/continuous-states/): 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.

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.