Interpreting Latent CoT Reasoning as Dynamical Systems

Abstract

arXiv:2607.09698v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent latent reasoning methods, such as CODI and COCONUT, face a fundamental interpretability problem: they maintain multiple superimposed candidate traces in the hidden space at each step, unlike explicit- CoT, which follows a single transparent reasoning trace. Existing mechanistic methods show compression, shortcuts, and superposition without explaining how reasoning evolves across latent steps. To address this gap, we model latent token sequen