ICML2026
Latent Thoughts Tuning: Bridging Context and Reasoning with Fused Information in Latent Tokens
Weihao Liu, Dehai Min, Lu Cheng
3 citations
Abstract
While explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) equips Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong reasoning capabilities, it constrains the model's thoughts to a discrete vocabulary space. Recently, reasoning in continuous latent space has emerged as a promising alternative, but current paradigms suffer from feature collapse and instability due to distribution mismatch when recurrently reusing hidden states, or alignment issues when relying on assistant models. To address this, we propose , a post-training framework that redefines how latent thoughts are constructed and deployed. Instead of relying solely on raw hidden states, our method introduces a mechanism that jointly leverages contextual hidden states and predictive semantic guidance from the vocabulary embedding space. Combined with a progressive three-stage curriculum learning pipeline, also enables dynamic switching between latent and explicit thinking modes. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing latent reasoning baselines, effectively mitigating feature collapse and achieving robust reasoning accuracy.