{
  "id": "2602.00449",
  "title": "Do Latent-CoT Models Think Step-by-Step? A Mechanistic Study on Sequential Reasoning Tasks",
  "authors": "Jia Liang, Liangming Pan",
  "first_public": "2026-01-31",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "arxiv": "2602.00449",
  "paper_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00449",
  "code_url": "https://github.com/jialiang19/latent-cot-thinking",
  "lens": [
    "analysis",
    "continuous"
  ],
  "representation": [
    "continuous-state"
  ],
  "computation": [
    "token-wise"
  ],
  "training": [
    "analysis-only"
  ],
  "questions": [
    "interpretability",
    "limitations",
    "evaluation"
  ],
  "evidence": [
    "empirical",
    "mechanistic",
    "probing"
  ],
  "modality": [
    "symbolic"
  ],
  "summary": "Uses mechanistic interventions on sequential tasks to test whether latent chain-of-thought models actually execute stepwise internal procedures.",
  "provenance": "Primary-source literature search, 2026-09-04",
  "author_names": [
    "Jia Liang",
    "Liangming Pan"
  ],
  "record_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2602.00449/",
  "legacy_record_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/#paper-2602-00449",
  "citation_date": "2026-01-31",
  "json_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2602.00449/record.json",
  "markdown_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2602.00449/index.md",
  "bibtex_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2602.00449/citation.bib",
  "csl_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2602.00449/citation.csl.json"
}