mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Latent Thoughts Tuning: Bridging Context and Reasoning with Fused Information in Latent Tokens

arXiv 2602.10229 ↗First posted 10 Feb 2026cs.CLcited by 3

On the map: LLM reasoning → Test-time compute and efficient thinking

Abstract (arXiv)

While explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) equips Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong reasoning capabilities, it constrains the model's thoughts to a discrete vocabulary space. Recently, reasoning in continuous latent space has emerged as a promising alternative, but current paradigms suffer from feature collapse and instability due to distribution mismatch when recurrently reusing hidden states, or alignment issues when relying on assistant models. To address this, we propose Latent Thoughts Tuning (LT-Tuning), a post-training framework that redefines how latent thoughts are constructed and deployed. Instead of relying solely on raw hidden states, our method introduces a Context-Prediction-Fusion mechanism that jointly leverages contextual hidden states and predictive semantic guidance from the vocabulary embedding space. Combined with a progressive three-stage curriculum learning pipeline, LT-Tuning also enables dynamic switching between latent and explicit thinking modes. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing latent reasoning baselines, effectively mitigating feature collapse and achieving robust reasoning accuracy.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 35 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2026.

Builds on

35 of 42 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Scaling Latent Reasoning via Looped Language Models29 Oct
  2. 2025First Try Matters: Revisiting the Role of Reflection in Reasoning Models9 Oct
  3. 2025SwiReasoning: Switch-Thinking in Latent and Explicit for Pareto-Superior Reasoning LLMs6 Oct
  4. 2025A Survey on Latent Reasoning8 Jul
  5. 2025Demystifying Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMs5 Feb
  6. 2024Compressed Chain of Thought: Efficient Reasoning Through Dense Representations17 Dec
  7. 2023Think before you speak: Training Language Models With Pause Tokens3 Oct
  8. 2023Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models17 May

Other references · 27

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
  2. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,192
  3. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
  4. 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 9,743
  5. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
  6. 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,601
  7. 2022Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Taskscited by 1,057
  8. 2021Are NLP Models really able to Solve Simple Math Word Problems?cited by 861
  9. 2024Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Spacecited by 763
  10. 2018Universal Transformerscited by 613
  11. 2016Solving General Arithmetic Word Problemscited by 353
  12. 2025CODI: Compressing Chain-of-Thought into Continuous Space via Self-Distillationcited by 216
15 more
  1. 2024Let's Think Dot by Dot: Hidden Computation in Transformer Language Modelscited by 186
  2. 2023Implicit Chain of Thought Reasoning via Knowledge Distillationcited by 165
  3. 2025Seed1.5-Thinking: Advancing Superb Reasoning Models with Reinforcement Learningcited by 159
  4. 2023Looped Transformers are Better at Learning Learning Algorithmscited by 135
  5. 2025Mixture-of-Recursions: Learning Dynamic Recursive Depths for Adaptive Token-Level Computationcited by 120
  6. 2025SoftCoT: Soft Chain-of-Thought for Efficient Reasoning with LLMscited by 110
  7. 2025Soft Thinking: Unlocking the Reasoning Potential of LLMs in Continuous Concept Spacecited by 109
  8. 2025Reasoning Beyond Language: A Comprehensive Survey on Latent Chain-of-Thought Reasoningcited by 72
  9. 2025SIM-CoT: Supervised Implicit Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 63
  10. 2024Can Looped Transformers Learn to Implement Multi-step Gradient Descent for In-context Learning?cited by 60
  11. 2025Soft Tokens, Hard Truthscited by 31
  12. 2025The Geometry of Reasoning: Flowing Logics in Representation Spacecited by 21
  13. 2025QuCo-RAG: Quantifying Uncertainty from the Pre-training Corpus for Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Generationcited by 10
  14. 2025SemCoT: Accelerating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning through Semantically-Aligned Implicit Tokenscited by 7
  15. 2025Self-Verifying Reflection Helps Transformers with CoT Reasoningcited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Latent Thought Flow: Efficient Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models
  2. 2025Thinking on the Fly: Test-Time Reasoning Enhancement via Latent Thought Policy Optimization
  3. 2025Latent Thinking Optimization: Your Latent Reasoning Language Model Secretly Encodes Reward Signals in Its Latent Thoughts
  4. 2026SPOT: Span-level Pause-of-Thought for Efficient and Interpretable Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models
  5. 2026A*-Thought-V2: Efficient Latent Reasoning via Geometric Dynamics of LLM
  6. 2026Unlocking the Black Box of Latent Reasoning: An Interpretability-Guided Approach to Intervention
  7. 2026Latent Recurrent Thoughts: Recurrent Refinement of Proposed Latents for Reasoning with Frozen LLMs
  8. 2024Language Models are Hidden Reasoners: Unlocking Latent Reasoning Capabilities via Self-Rewarding