{
  "id": "2609.33271",
  "title": "Next Thoughts Are Distributions: Generative Autoregressive Reasoning in the Latent Space",
  "authors": "Yang Li, Yi Wang, Shiyuan Huang, Yang Liu, Hao Wang, Chengzhi Mao",
  "first_public": "2026-09-27",
  "added_at": "2026-10-18",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "arxiv": "2609.33271",
  "paper_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33271",
  "lens": [
    "continuous",
    "beyond-sequential"
  ],
  "representation": [
    "continuous-state"
  ],
  "computation": [
    "token-wise",
    "diffusion"
  ],
  "training": [
    "supervised",
    "reinforcement-learning"
  ],
  "questions": [
    "capability",
    "efficiency",
    "scaling"
  ],
  "evidence": [
    "empirical"
  ],
  "modality": [
    "language",
    "symbolic"
  ],
  "summary": "Adds a diffusion head that samples the next continuous thought from a distribution rather than predicting one fixed vector. Feeds each sampled thought back into an autoregressive reasoner, supporting variable-length latent traces and multiple reasoning paths.",
  "provenance": "Primary-source literature search, 2026-10-18",
  "author_names": [
    "Yang Li",
    "Yi Wang",
    "Shiyuan Huang",
    "Yang Liu",
    "Hao Wang",
    "Chengzhi Mao"
  ],
  "record_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.33271/",
  "legacy_record_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/#paper-2609-33271",
  "citation_date": "2026-09-27",
  "json_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.33271/record.json",
  "markdown_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.33271/index.md",
  "bibtex_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.33271/citation.bib",
  "csl_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.33271/citation.csl.json"
}