REVIEW 25 cited by
Soft Thinking: Unlocking the Reasoning Potential of LLMs in Continuous Concept Space
Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.
SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event
T0 review · schema-true
One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.
pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp
Soft Thinking: Unlocking the Reasoning Potential of LLMs in Continuous Concept Space
read the original abstract
Human cognition typically involves thinking through abstract, fluid concepts rather than strictly using discrete linguistic tokens. Current reasoning models, however, are constrained to reasoning within the boundaries of human language, processing discrete token embeddings that represent fixed points in the semantic space. This discrete constraint restricts the expressive power and upper potential of such reasoning models, often causing incomplete exploration of reasoning paths, as standard Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods rely on sampling one token per step. In this work, we introduce Soft Thinking, a training-free method that emulates human-like "soft" reasoning by generating soft, abstract concept tokens in a continuous concept space. These concept tokens are created by the probability-weighted mixture of token embeddings, which form the continuous concept space, enabling smooth transitions and richer representations that transcend traditional discrete boundaries. In essence, each generated concept token encapsulates multiple meanings from related discrete tokens, implicitly exploring various reasoning paths to converge effectively toward the correct answer. Empirical evaluations on diverse mathematical and coding benchmarks consistently demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Soft Thinking, improving pass@1 accuracy by up to 2.48 points while simultaneously reducing token usage by up to 22.4% compared to standard CoT. Qualitative analysis further reveals that Soft Thinking outputs remain highly interpretable and readable, highlighting the potential of Soft Thinking to break the inherent bottleneck of discrete language-based reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/eric-ai-lab/Soft-Thinking.
Forward citations
Cited by 25 Pith papers
-
Efficient and Trainable Language Model Test-Time Scaling via Local Branch Routing
Local Branch Routing (LBR) is a token-level framework for test-time scaling in language models that uses local branch hidden states for routing and supports end-to-end RL, showing gains in Pass@1 and Pass@32 on math r...
-
Efficient and Trainable Language Model Test-Time Scaling via Local Branch Routing
LBR performs token-level test-time scaling via local branch routing on hidden states, enabling end-to-end RL training and improving Pass@1 and Pass@32 on math benchmarks over CoT and RLVR baselines.
-
Demystifying Hidden-State Recurrence: Switchable Latent Reasoning with On-Policy Reinforcement Learning
SWITCH uses explicit <swi> and </swi> boundary tokens to make latent chain-of-thought compatible with on-policy RL (GRPO) and open to causal mechanistic probing, outperforming prior hidden-state recurrence methods.
-
Observable Patterns Are Not Explanations: A Causal-Geometric Analysis of Latent Reasoning Models
Evaluation of two latent reasoning models against controls shows observable latent patterns appear without the proposed mechanisms, have graded causal effects on behavior, and concentrate in structured low-rank direct...
-
PluRule: A Benchmark for Moderating Pluralistic Communities on Social Media
PluRule is a new multimodal multilingual benchmark showing that state-of-the-art vision-language models perform only marginally better than a trivial baseline at detecting specific rule violations in pluralistic onlin...
-
UniVLR: Unifying Text and Vision in Visual Latent Reasoning for Multimodal LLMs
UniVLR unifies textual and visual reasoning in multimodal LLMs by compressing reasoning traces and auxiliary images into visual latent tokens for direct inference without interleaved text CoT.
-
Thinking Without Words: Efficient Latent Reasoning with Abstract Chain-of-Thought
Abstract-CoT lets models reason with short discrete latent token sequences from a reserved vocabulary, using warm-up training and RL to match verbal CoT performance with up to 11.6x fewer tokens.
-
Reasoning Within the Mind: Dynamic Multimodal Interleaving in Latent Space
DMLR performs dynamic visual-textual interleaving in latent space using confidence-guided latent policy gradient optimization and a dynamic visual injection strategy, yielding improved multimodal reasoning on benchmarks.
-
Dropout-GRPO: Variational Stochasticity for Continuous Latent Reasoning
Dropout-GRPO uses structured dropout to generate trajectory variance for GRPO in latent-reasoning models like Coconut, raising GSM8K pass@1 from 27.29% to 29.01%.
-
Geometric Latent Reasoning Induces Shorter Generations in LLMs
GLR formulates latent reasoning as geometric path approximation in pretrained embedding space and reports shorter LLM generations on math tasks without an explicit length penalty.
-
Generative Recursive Reasoning
GRAM turns recursive latent reasoning into a generative probabilistic model via stochastic trajectories and amortized variational inference, claiming better performance on structured reasoning tasks than deterministic...
-
Generative Recursive Reasoning
GRAM is a latent-variable generative model that performs recursive reasoning via stochastic trajectories, trained with amortized variational inference to support multi-hypothesis reasoning and unconditional generation.
-
Latent Action Control for Reasoning-Guided Unified Image Generation
Latent Action Control learns unobserved action trajectories via variational alignment and GRPO to inject reasoning into flow-based image generation, yielding gains on compositional benchmarks.
-
LEPO: Latent Reasoning Policy Optimization for Large Language Models
LEPO applies RL to stochastic latent representations in LLMs via Gumbel-Softmax to support diverse reasoning paths and unified optimization.
-
SeLaR: Selective Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models
SeLaR selectively applies latent soft reasoning in LLMs via entropy gating and contrastive regularization, outperforming standard CoT on five benchmarks without training.
-
LightThinker++: From Reasoning Compression to Memory Management
LightThinker++ adds explicit adaptive memory management and a trajectory synthesis pipeline to LLM reasoning, cutting peak token use by ~70% while gaining accuracy in standard and long-horizon agent tasks.
-
TERMINATOR: Learning Optimal Exit Points for Early Stopping in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Terminator learns to predict optimal early-exit points in chain-of-thought reasoning by training on the first positions where the model emits its final answer, yielding 14-55% shorter outputs with no accuracy loss.
-
EndoCoT: Scaling Endogenous Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Diffusion Models
Iterative latent thought refinement plus terminal text grounding lets diffusion models solve multi-step visual reasoning tasks at 92.1% average accuracy, beating DiffThinker by 8.3 points.
-
The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Survey
Survey that defines agentic RL for LLMs via POMDPs, introduces a taxonomy of planning/tool-use/memory/reasoning capabilities and domains, and compiles open environments from over 500 papers.
-
DiscoLoop: Looping Discrete Embeddings and Continuous Hidden States for Multi-hop Reasoning
DiscoLoop adds a discrete embedding channel to looped transformers to fix representational misalignment in two-hop reasoning, yielding near-perfect accuracy on synthetic tasks and better pretraining loss on real data.
-
Thinking Economically: A Hierarchical Framework for Adaptive-Complexity Reasoning in LLMs
HAB applies coarse-to-fine budgeting to LLM reasoning, predicting per-problem depth and learning intra-step token budgets via PPL comparisons and adaptive Pareto optimization, yielding higher accuracy and lower token ...
-
LEPO: Latent Reasoning Policy Optimization for Large Language Models
LEPO applies RL to continuous latent representations in LLMs by injecting Gumbel-Softmax stochasticity for diverse trajectory sampling and unified gradient estimation, outperforming existing discrete and latent RL methods.
-
Towards Explainable Industrial Anomaly Detection via Knowledge-Guided Latent Reasoning
Reason-IAD improves explainable industrial anomaly detection by combining retrieval-augmented category knowledge with entropy-guided latent reasoning and dynamic visual patch injection in MLLMs.
-
Latent-CURE for Breast Cancer Diagnosis
Latent-CURE introduces latent-space chain-of-thought reasoning and dual-asymmetric optimization to produce transparent, robust breast cancer diagnoses in imbalanced cohorts.
-
N-GRPO: Embedding-Level Neighbor Mixing for Enhanced Policy Optimization
N-GRPO enhances GRPO via Semantic Neighbor Mixing of token embeddings to improve diversity and consistency in LLM math reasoning rollouts.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.