LaTER: Efficient Test-Time Reasoning via Latent Exploration and Explicit Verification
Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves large language models (LLMs) on difficult tasks, but it also makes inference expensive because every intermediate step must be generated as a discrete token. Latent reasoning reduces visible token generation by propagating continuous states, yet replacing explicit derivations with latent computation can hurt tasks that require symbolic checking. We propose Latent-Then-Explicit Reasoning (LaTER), a two-stage paradigm that first performs bounded exploration in a continuous latent space and then switches to explicit CoT for verification and answer generation. In a training-free instantiation, LaTER projects final-layer hidden states back to the input...
| Authors | Xuan Li, Yining Wang, Yuchen Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 8 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 May 2026 |
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