Does Latent Chain-of-Thought Actually Reason? A Single, Unifying Taxonomy for Latent Reasoning
arXiv:2610.21182v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent chain-of-thought replaces written reasoning steps with continuous hidden states, giving models additional steps to compute before answering. It remains unclear what computation these steps actually perform. High task accuracy and decodable intermediate answers do not establish that a model uses its latent chain to reach an answer. We study this question across twenty-one model-task configurations covering three training recipes, three reaso…