R-Capsule: Compressing High-Level Plans for Efficient Large Language Model Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Shan, Hongyu, Song, Mingyang, Dai, Chang, Liang, Di, Chen, Han
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Shan, Hongyu
Song, Mingyang
Dai, Chang
Liang, Di
Chen, Han
author_facet Shan, Hongyu
Song, Mingyang
Dai, Chang
Liang, Di
Chen, Han
contents Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting helps Large Language Models (LLMs) tackle complex reasoning by eliciting explicit step-by-step rationales. However, CoT's verbosity increases latency and memory usage and may propagate early errors across long chains. We propose the Reasoning Capsule (R-Capsule), a framework that aims to combine the efficiency of latent reasoning with the transparency of explicit CoT. The core idea is to compress the high-level plan into a small set of learned latent tokens (a Reasoning Capsule) while keeping execution steps lightweight or explicit. This hybrid approach is inspired by the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, where we encourage the capsule to be approximately minimal yet sufficient for the task. Minimality is encouraged via a low-capacity bottleneck, which helps improve efficiency. Sufficiency is encouraged via a dual objective: a primary task loss for answer accuracy and an auxiliary plan-reconstruction loss that encourages the capsule to faithfully represent the original textual plan. The reconstruction objective helps ground the latent space, thereby improving interpretability and reducing the use of uninformative shortcuts. Our framework strikes a balance between efficiency, accuracy, and interpretability, thereby reducing the visible token footprint of reasoning while maintaining or improving accuracy on complex benchmarks. Our codes are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Reasoning-Capsule-7BE0
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_22131
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle R-Capsule: Compressing High-Level Plans for Efficient Large Language Model Reasoning
Shan, Hongyu
Song, Mingyang
Dai, Chang
Liang, Di
Chen, Han
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting helps Large Language Models (LLMs) tackle complex reasoning by eliciting explicit step-by-step rationales. However, CoT's verbosity increases latency and memory usage and may propagate early errors across long chains. We propose the Reasoning Capsule (R-Capsule), a framework that aims to combine the efficiency of latent reasoning with the transparency of explicit CoT. The core idea is to compress the high-level plan into a small set of learned latent tokens (a Reasoning Capsule) while keeping execution steps lightweight or explicit. This hybrid approach is inspired by the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, where we encourage the capsule to be approximately minimal yet sufficient for the task. Minimality is encouraged via a low-capacity bottleneck, which helps improve efficiency. Sufficiency is encouraged via a dual objective: a primary task loss for answer accuracy and an auxiliary plan-reconstruction loss that encourages the capsule to faithfully represent the original textual plan. The reconstruction objective helps ground the latent space, thereby improving interpretability and reducing the use of uninformative shortcuts. Our framework strikes a balance between efficiency, accuracy, and interpretability, thereby reducing the visible token footprint of reasoning while maintaining or improving accuracy on complex benchmarks. Our codes are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Reasoning-Capsule-7BE0
title R-Capsule: Compressing High-Level Plans for Efficient Large Language Model Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22131