# JEPA-Reasoner: Decoupling Latent Reasoning from Token Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19171 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19171/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 11 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Test-time compute and efficient thinking](https://mlsanity.com/lr/test-time-compute-and-efficient-thinking/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09985/) (2025)
- [Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06769/) (2024)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05442/) (2023)
- [Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05171/) (2025)
- [LLMs are Single-threaded Reasoners: Demystifying the Working Mechanism of Soft Thinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03440/) (2025)
- [Denoising with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03755/) (2024)
- [M3-JEPA: Multimodal Alignment via Multi-gate MoE based on the Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05929/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [WorldArena: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Perception and Functional Utility of Embodied World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08971/) (2026)
- [The Latent Space: Foundation, Evolution, Mechanism, Ability, and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02029/) (2026)
- [The Dual-Stream Transformer: Channelized Architecture for Interpretable Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07461/) (2026)
- [Native Multilingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Low-Resource Southeast Asian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00533/) (2026)
- [VR-JEPA: Learning Contrastive-State Latent Guidance for Generation-based Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.40129/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current autoregressive language models couple high-level reasoning and low-level token generation into a single sequential process, making the reasoning trajectory vulnerable to compounding expression errors. We propose JEPA-Reasoner, a novel architectural paradigm that decouples these tasks using a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) for pure latent-space reasoning and a separate Talker module for linguistic reconstruction. By isolating the reasoning engine from the discrete token-sampling process, our architecture enables: (1) Error Containment, where token-level failures cannot propagate into the latent reasoning chain; (2) Continuous Guidance, providing the generator with access to the entire lossless reasoning trajectory; and (3) Representation of Uncertainty, allowing the model to maintain multiple hypotheses via mixed latent vectors. Controlled experiments on synthetic and natural language tasks demonstrate that this decoupling enables a 0.9B model to achieve a 149.5% improvement in 8-shot GSM8K accuracy over a coupled Transformer baseline trained on identical data. This work shifts the focus from scaling coupled models to investigating decoupled architectures as a more robust foundation for complex reasoning.