The Weight of Silence: A Causal Case for Weights Over the Scratchpad in Latent Chess Reasoning
Latent, or silent, reasoning lets language models carry out intermediate computation in continuous vector space instead of words, and is widely assumed to function as an internal scratchpad the model consults during inference. Whether that assumption survives reinforcement learning has not been tested directly: existing causal analyses of latent reasoning are confined to math and logic tasks, comparing reliance on thoughts within one checkpoint, never before and after RL. We train a chess-playing model through a staged latent-reasoning curriculum followed by reinforcement learning, and find legality climbs monotonically to 61% (from a 48% pre-RL baseline) while checkmate confabulation is ...
| Authors | Ishan S. Kshirsagar |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 23 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 July 2026 |
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