Learning When to Stop: Adaptive Latent Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ning, Alex, Kuo, Yen-Ling, Gomes, Gabe
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Ning, Alex
Kuo, Yen-Ling
Gomes, Gabe
author_facet Ning, Alex
Kuo, Yen-Ling
Gomes, Gabe
contents Latent reasoning represents a new development in Transformer language models that has shown potential in compressing reasoning lengths compared to chain-of-thought reasoning. By directly passing the information-rich previous final latent state into the next sequence, latent reasoning removes the restriction to human language tokens as the medium for reasoning. We develop adaptive-length latent reasoning models and introduce a post-SFT reinforcement-learning methodology to optimize latent reasoning length by minimizing reasoning length while maintaining accuracy. This, in turn, further reduces compute usage and raises the bar on the compressive capabilities of latent reasoning models. Experiments on the Llama 3.2 1B model and the GSM8K-Aug dataset show a $52\%$ drop in total reasoning length with no penalty to accuracy. In future work, we plan to extend to additional models and datasets, analyze relationships between training coefficients, experiment with architecture variations, and continue our knowledge distillation for latent reasoning SFT efforts. We make our code and pretrained weights available at https://github.com/apning/adaptive-latent-reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_21581
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning When to Stop: Adaptive Latent Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning
Ning, Alex
Kuo, Yen-Ling
Gomes, Gabe
Machine Learning
Latent reasoning represents a new development in Transformer language models that has shown potential in compressing reasoning lengths compared to chain-of-thought reasoning. By directly passing the information-rich previous final latent state into the next sequence, latent reasoning removes the restriction to human language tokens as the medium for reasoning. We develop adaptive-length latent reasoning models and introduce a post-SFT reinforcement-learning methodology to optimize latent reasoning length by minimizing reasoning length while maintaining accuracy. This, in turn, further reduces compute usage and raises the bar on the compressive capabilities of latent reasoning models. Experiments on the Llama 3.2 1B model and the GSM8K-Aug dataset show a $52\%$ drop in total reasoning length with no penalty to accuracy. In future work, we plan to extend to additional models and datasets, analyze relationships between training coefficients, experiment with architecture variations, and continue our knowledge distillation for latent reasoning SFT efforts. We make our code and pretrained weights available at https://github.com/apning/adaptive-latent-reasoning.
title Learning When to Stop: Adaptive Latent Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21581