NoisyCoconut: Counterfactual Consensus via Latent Space Reasoning

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Hauptverfasser: Jerge, Michael, Evans, David
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Jerge, Michael
Evans, David
author_facet Jerge, Michael
Evans, David
contents This paper presents NoisyCoconut, a novel inference-time method that enhances large language model (LLM) reliability by manipulating internal representations. Unlike fine-tuning methods that require extensive retraining, NoisyCoconut operates directly on model representations during inference and requires no retraining. Rather than training models to reason in latent space, we inject controlled noise into latent trajectories to generate diverse reasoning paths. Agreement among these paths provides a confidence signal, enabling models to abstain when uncertain. We demonstrate that this approach achieves effective coverage-accuracy tradeoffs across multiple reasoning benchmarks without requiring access to training data or modification of model parameters. This approach provides a practical pathway to improving the reliability of LLM outputs while maintaining compatibility with existing models. Our experiments show that unanimous agreement among noise-perturbed paths reduces error rates from 40-70% to below 15%, enabling models to exceed 95% accuracy on mathematical reasoning tasks through selective abstention.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_08221
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NoisyCoconut: Counterfactual Consensus via Latent Space Reasoning
Jerge, Michael
Evans, David
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
This paper presents NoisyCoconut, a novel inference-time method that enhances large language model (LLM) reliability by manipulating internal representations. Unlike fine-tuning methods that require extensive retraining, NoisyCoconut operates directly on model representations during inference and requires no retraining. Rather than training models to reason in latent space, we inject controlled noise into latent trajectories to generate diverse reasoning paths. Agreement among these paths provides a confidence signal, enabling models to abstain when uncertain. We demonstrate that this approach achieves effective coverage-accuracy tradeoffs across multiple reasoning benchmarks without requiring access to training data or modification of model parameters. This approach provides a practical pathway to improving the reliability of LLM outputs while maintaining compatibility with existing models. Our experiments show that unanimous agreement among noise-perturbed paths reduces error rates from 40-70% to below 15%, enabling models to exceed 95% accuracy on mathematical reasoning tasks through selective abstention.
title NoisyCoconut: Counterfactual Consensus via Latent Space Reasoning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08221