Awesome LLM Implicit Reasoning

A collection of papers that unlock the implicit reasoning ability of LLMs.

2025

1. Efficient Reasoning with Hidden Thinking

   Xuan Shen, Yizhou Wang, Xiangxi Shi, Yanzhi Wang, Pu Zhao, Jiuxiang Gu. Preprint'25

2. Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approach

   Jonas Geiping, Sean McLeish, Neel Jain, John Kirchenbauer, Siddharth Singh, Brian R. Bartoldson, Bhavya Kailkhura, Abhinav Bhatele, Tom Goldstein. Preprint'25

3. CODI: Compressing Chain-of-Thought into Continuous Space via Self-Distillation

   Zhenyi Shen, Hanqi Yan, Linhai Zhang, Zhanghao Hu, Yali Du, Yulan He. Preprint'25

4. SoftCoT: Soft Chain-of-Thought for Efficient Reasoning with LLMs

   Yige Xu, Xu Guo, Zhiwei Zeng, Chunyan Miao. Preprint'25

5. Scalable Language Models with Posterior Inference of Latent Thought Vectors

   Deqian Kong, Minglu Zhao, Dehong Xu, Bo Pang, Shu Wang, Edouardo Honig, Zhangzhang Si, Chuan Li, Jianwen Xie, Sirui Xie, Ying Nian Wu. Preprint'25

6. Reasoning with Latent Thoughts: On the Power of Looped Transformers

   Nikunj Saunshi, Nishanth Dikkala, Zhiyuan Li, Sanjiv Kumar, Sashank J. Reddi. ICLR'25

7. CoT-Valve: Length-Compressible Chain-of-Thought Tuning

   Xinyin Ma, Guangnian Wan, Runpeng Yu, Gongfan Fang, Xinchao Wang. Preprint'25

8. LightThinker: Thinking Step-by-Step Compression

   Jintian Zhang, Yuqi Zhu, Mengshu Sun, Yujie Luo, Shuofei Qiao, Lun Du, Da Zheng, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang. Preprint'25

9. Beyond Words: A Latent Memory Approach to Internal Reasoning in LLMs

   José I. Orlicki. Preprint'25

2024

1. From Explicit CoT to Implicit CoT: Learning to Internalize CoT Step by Step

   Yuntian Deng, Yejin Choi, Stuart Shieber. Preprint'24

2. Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space

   Shibo Hao, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, DiJia Su, Xian Li, Zhiting Hu, Jason Weston, Yuandong Tian. Preprint'24

3. Compressed Chain of Thought: Efficient Reasoning Through Dense Representations

   Jeffrey Cheng, Benjamin Van Durme. Preprint'24

2023

1. Implicit Chain of Thought Reasoning via Knowledge Distillation

   Yuntian Deng, Kiran Prasad, Roland Fernandez, Paul Smolensky, Vishrav Chaudhary, Stuart Shieber. Preprint'23