Latent Recurrent Thoughts: Recurrent Refinement of Proposed Latents for Reasoning with Frozen LLMs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01117v1
• Date: Tue, 01 Sep 2026 11:56:17 GMT
• Title: Latent Recurrent Thoughts: Recurrent Refinement of Proposed Latents for Reasoning with Frozen LLMs
• Abstract summary: Chain-of-thought reasoning unfolds in discrete token space.<n> Reasoning instead in a model's continuous representation space.<n>We instantiate this as Latent Recurrent Thoughts.
• Score: 16.72007494160683
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Chain-of-thought reasoning unfolds in discrete token space: each step is committed as text, errors propagate, and eliciting good traces presupposes traces to imitate. Reasoning instead in a model's continuous representation space - where intermediate states are vectors rather than words - sidesteps these constraints, but leaves open how those latent states should be computed. We approach this along two axes. First, we keep a large language model (LLM) frozen and use it for what it is already good at - modeling and decoding sequences - while a small auxiliary network supplies continuous latent thoughts as input. Second, we produce those latents by recurrence: a tiny recurrent reasoner refines them over many steps, decoupling the depth of computation from the size of the model, so that the latents are a product of iterative processing rather than a single forward pass. We instantiate this as Latent Recurrent Thoughts (LRT): a task-dedicated proposer supplies base latents, a recurrent reasoner refines them through bounded residual corrections, and the frozen LLM decodes the answer. On symbolic reasoning with answer supervision but no reasoning traces (Countdown-4, Sudoku) and on natural-language reasoning (HumanEval, MBPP, StrategyQA), LRT substantially outperforms prior frozen-decoder continuous-space reasoning methods under an identical decoder, prompt, data, and training budget, and outperforms non-thinking-mode chain-of-thought prompting on the same backbone at a small fraction of its inference compute.

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