Dynamics Within Latent Chain-of-Thought: An Empirical Study of Causal Structure
Treats intermediate latent steps as variables that can be replaced and recomputed. Tests Coconut and CODI to determine which steps affect answers, how changes propagate, and when the model commits to one answer.
First public: · Added to this list: November 2, 2026
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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.