Encode, Think, Decode: Scaling test-time reasoning with recursive latent thoughts

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Koishekenov, Yeskendir, Lipani, Aldo, Cancedda, Nicola
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866916997801967616
author Koishekenov, Yeskendir
Lipani, Aldo
Cancedda, Nicola
author_facet Koishekenov, Yeskendir
Lipani, Aldo
Cancedda, Nicola
contents Most efforts to improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) involve either scaling the number of parameters and the size of training data, or scaling inference computation by letting models generate complex chains of thought. Motivated by interpretability studies showing that the crucial computation required for reasoning tasks is concentrated in a limited range of layers, we introduce Encode-Think-Decode (ETD), a method that enhances the reasoning capabilities of a base model by training it to iterate over a small subset of reasoning-relevant layers during the mid-training stage. ETD amplifies latent reasoning while preserving the original architecture, parameter count, hyperparameters, and training data composition. When iterating on the selected layers at inference time, ETD models yield substantial gains on 17 reasoning benchmarks, including +28.4% relative accuracy improvement on GSM8K and +36% on MATH with the OLMo-2 1B Base model. We also explore an adaptive depth strategy that adjusts the computation per input token. Our results show that recursive latent reasoning offers a simple and effective path to stronger LLM reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_07358
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Encode, Think, Decode: Scaling test-time reasoning with recursive latent thoughts
Koishekenov, Yeskendir
Lipani, Aldo
Cancedda, Nicola
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Most efforts to improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) involve either scaling the number of parameters and the size of training data, or scaling inference computation by letting models generate complex chains of thought. Motivated by interpretability studies showing that the crucial computation required for reasoning tasks is concentrated in a limited range of layers, we introduce Encode-Think-Decode (ETD), a method that enhances the reasoning capabilities of a base model by training it to iterate over a small subset of reasoning-relevant layers during the mid-training stage. ETD amplifies latent reasoning while preserving the original architecture, parameter count, hyperparameters, and training data composition. When iterating on the selected layers at inference time, ETD models yield substantial gains on 17 reasoning benchmarks, including +28.4% relative accuracy improvement on GSM8K and +36% on MATH with the OLMo-2 1B Base model. We also explore an adaptive depth strategy that adjusts the computation per input token. Our results show that recursive latent reasoning offers a simple and effective path to stronger LLM reasoning.
title Encode, Think, Decode: Scaling test-time reasoning with recursive latent thoughts
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07358