Why Limit the Residual Stream to Layers and Not Tokens? Persistent Memory for Continuous Latent Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities on mathematical and multi-hop planning tasks. The CoCoNuT (Chain of Continuous Thought) paradigm~citehao2024coconut extends this by enabling models to reason in latent space, exploring multiple reasoning paths simultaneously rather than committing to a single chain early on. However, we identify a limitation we term the concept bottleneck. At each reasoning pass, intermediate hidden states are overwritten, causing the model to lose critical facts computed in earlier steps as reasoning depth increases. We observe this empirically. On HotpotQA, vanilla CoCoNuT (10.4% EM) fails to improve over the CoT baseline (11.0% EM), and performance degrades with curriculum depth on GSM8K. To address this, we propose AGCLR (Adaptive Gated Continuous Latent Reasoning), which augments CoCoNuT with a textitGated Concept Stream. A persistent residual memory maintained across all reasoning passes, controlled by three learned gates: a textitwrite gate that commits intermediate facts to memory, a textitread gate that retrieves relevant prior states, and a textitforget gate that prunes irrelevant context. Evaluated on GSM8K, HotpotQA, and ProsQA using GPT-2 as our base model, AGCLR achieves consistent improvements across all types of datasets. With the performance gap compounding as curriculum depth increases, directly resolving the concept bottleneck. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/JJJJ/README.md