Reasoning as Energy Minimization over Structured Latent Trajectories
Single-shot neural decoders commit to answers without iterative refinement, while chain-of-thought methods introduce discrete intermediate steps but lack a scalar measure of reasoning progress. We propose Energy-Based Reasoning via Structured Latent Planning (EBRM), which models reasoning as gradient-based optimization of a multi-step latent trajectory $z_{1:T}$ under a learned energy function $E(h_x, z)$. The energy decomposes into per-step compatibility, transition consistency, and trajectory smoothness terms. Training combines supervised encoder-decoder learning with contrastive energy shaping using hard negatives, while inference performs gradient descent or Langevin dynamics over $z$...
| Authors | David K. Johansson |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 30 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 March 2026 |
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