Observable Patterns Are Not Explanations: A Causal-Geometric Analysis of Latent Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606.12689v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent reasoning models (LRMs) replace explicit chain-of-thought with continuous thoughts. Recent work treats observable latent-state patterns, such as BFS-like frontiers and decodable arithmetic computation, as evidence for internal reasoning mechanisms. Evaluating two LRMs (Coconut and CODI) against controls lacking the proposed recurrence or curriculum, we find these patterns also appear in the controls and do not always causally affect behavior. Causal interventions reveal that latent-thought utilization is not binary but graded, scaling with

Source: arXiv cs.CL — read the full report at the original publisher.

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