{
  "id": "2609.33134",
  "title": "Ceiling of a Task: When Can a Transformer Succeed Without Its Chain of Thought?",
  "authors": "Jiashu He, Jinxuan Fan, Xiao Xiao, Radu Marculescu, Alejandro Ribeiro",
  "first_public": "2026-09-27",
  "added_at": "2026-10-18",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "arxiv": "2609.33134",
  "paper_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33134",
  "lens": [
    "analysis",
    "learned-tokens"
  ],
  "representation": [
    "discrete-token"
  ],
  "computation": [
    "token-wise"
  ],
  "training": [
    "analysis-only"
  ],
  "questions": [
    "theory",
    "limitations",
    "evaluation"
  ],
  "evidence": [
    "formal",
    "empirical",
    "boundary"
  ],
  "modality": [
    "language",
    "symbolic"
  ],
  "summary": "Analyzes tasks for which a fixed-depth transformer needs an informative chain of thought to exceed a task-specific accuracy limit. Combines circuit-based results with experiments that replace, erase, or shuffle reasoning tokens, including comparisons with filler tokens.",
  "provenance": "Primary-source literature search, 2026-10-18",
  "author_names": [
    "Jiashu He",
    "Jinxuan Fan",
    "Xiao Xiao",
    "Radu Marculescu",
    "Alejandro Ribeiro"
  ],
  "record_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.33134/",
  "legacy_record_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/#paper-2609-33134",
  "citation_date": "2026-09-27",
  "json_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.33134/record.json",
  "markdown_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.33134/index.md",
  "bibtex_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.33134/citation.bib",
  "csl_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.33134/citation.csl.json"
}