Latent Reasoning with Normalizing Flows

Published
Source
arXiv
Paper number
348
Field
LLMs / NLP
arXiv ID
2606.06447

Key points

  • We place a normalizing flow inside the LLM backbone to provide exact likelihoods for continuous CoT while preserving left-to-right decoding and KV-cache support.
  • Continuous thought positions are handled by the NF head, while text positions are handled by the LM head, and both are processed jointly in the same causal stream.
  • The system supports both supervised likelihood training and policy-gradient optimization through a unified interface.
  • Even with Gaussian perturbations in latent space, pass@1 remains nearly unchanged, showing that the learned continuous thought space is locally smooth and functionally robust.
  • On code-generation benchmarks, it improves accuracy while reducing inference cost compared with explicit CoT and prior latent reasoning methods such as LaDiR.

Paper links

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