Do Latent-CoT Models Think Step-by-Step? A Mechanistic Study on Sequential Reasoning Tasks
Uses mechanistic interventions on sequential tasks to test whether latent chain-of-thought models actually execute stepwise internal procedures.
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arXiv:2602.00449 · Initial submission: 2026-01-31
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Analysis and 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.
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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