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Does Latent Chain-of-Thought Actually Reason? A Single, Unifying Taxonomy for Latent Reasoning

Jingjie Qiu, Sheldon Yu, Xunyi Jiang, Jiajin Liu, Zihan Huang, Zhendong Chu, Tong Yu, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu

Uses chain deletion, content replacement, probes, and trajectory analysis across 21 model-task configurations. Separates what continuous states encode from whether the model uses their content, finding that dependence on the chain varies with task and training recipe.

First public: · Added to this list: October 18, 2026

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arXiv:2610.21182 · Initial submission: 2026-10-15

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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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