{
  "id": "2610.34173",
  "title": "Reasoning or Just Prompting? Probing the Mechanism of Latent Chemical Reasoning",
  "authors": "Kaiyuan Lu, Jiatong Li, Yatao Bian",
  "first_public": "2026-10-25",
  "added_at": "2026-11-02",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "arxiv": "2610.34173",
  "paper_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34173",
  "html_url": "https://arxiv.org/html/2610.34173v1",
  "lens": [
    "analysis",
    "continuous"
  ],
  "representation": [
    "continuous-state",
    "multimodal-latent"
  ],
  "computation": [
    "token-wise"
  ],
  "training": [
    "analysis-only"
  ],
  "questions": [
    "interpretability",
    "evaluation",
    "limitations"
  ],
  "evidence": [
    "empirical",
    "mechanistic",
    "probing"
  ],
  "modality": [
    "language",
    "multimodal",
    "symbolic"
  ],
  "summary": "Replaces, removes and perturbs latent sequences in a chemical reasoning model. Swapping sequences between molecules often preserves task scores, and a fixed prefix can match input-dependent latent sequences.",
  "provenance": "Primary-source literature review, 2026-11-02",
  "author_names": [
    "Kaiyuan Lu",
    "Jiatong Li",
    "Yatao Bian"
  ],
  "record_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2610.34173/",
  "legacy_record_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/#paper-2610-34173",
  "citation_date": "2026-10-25",
  "json_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2610.34173/record.json",
  "markdown_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2610.34173/index.md",
  "bibtex_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2610.34173/citation.bib",
  "csl_url": "https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2610.34173/citation.csl.json",
  "pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.34173"
}