Training LLMs to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space

presents Coconut (Chain of Continuous Thought), a novel paradigm that enables LLMs to reason in continuous latent space rather than natural language; Coconut takes the last hidden state of the LLM as the reasoning state and feeds it back to the LLM as the subsequent input embedding directly in the continuous space; this leads to what the authors refer to as "continuous thought" which augments an LLM's capability on reasoning tasks; it demonstrates improved performance on complex reasoning tasks through emergent breadth-first search capabilities.