揭示隐式推理中有效监督的关键机制,提升模型逻辑准确性。
What Makes Effective Supervision in Latent Chain-of-Thought: An Information-Theoretic Analysis

- 从信息论角度分析隐式思维链,发现双重崩溃问题
- 提出轨迹与空间双维度监督,显著提升推理精度
- 用互信息量化监督效果,适合研究大模型推理机制者
隐式思维链(Latent CoT)将推理过程内置于连续隐藏状态中,是替代显式离散推理路径的有前景方法。然而,由于结果监督提供的学习信号弱,隐式轨迹易发生语义漂移,导致推理不稳定。本文从信息论视角分析发现,该问题源于优化路径上的梯度衰减与潜在空间中的表征漂移。我们进一步将过程监督分解为两个互补维度:轨迹监督(注入逐步推理信号)与空间监督(保持潜在流形的语义结构)。分析表明,刚性几何压缩会压缩推理空间,而生成重建能提供更灵活的语义锚点,更好地保留信息容量。为此,我们提出统一潜在探测器(ULP),用于量化隐式轨迹与显式推理步骤间的互信息。实验揭示明确的‘信息-性能绑定’:推理准确率取决于隐式链中保留的信息保真度。这些发现为隐式推理监督提供了原则性框架,建议从几何模仿转向互信息最大化。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Latent Chain-of-Thought (CoT) internalizes reasoning within continuous hidden states, offering a promising alternative to verbose discrete reasoning traces. However, robust latent reasoning remains difficult because outcome supervision provides weak learning signals and leaves latent trajectories prone to semantic drift. In this work, we analyze Latent CoT from an information-theoretic perspective and identify this failure as a dual collapse: gradient attenuation along the optimization path and representational drift in the latent space. We further decompose process supervision into two complementary dimensions: Trajectory Supervision, which injects dense stepwise reasoning signals, and Space Supervision, which preserves the semantic structure of the latent manifold. Our analysis shows that rigid geometric compression can collapse the reasoning space, whereas generative reconstruction provides a more flexible semantic anchor that better preserves information capacity. To measure these effects, we introduce the Unified Latent Probe (ULP), which quantifies the mutual information between latent trajectories and explicit reasoning steps. Experiments reveal a clear Information-Performance Binding: reasoning accuracy depends on the information fidelity preserved in the latent chain. These findings provide a principled framework for latent reasoning supervision and suggest shifting from geometric imitation toward mutual information maximization. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/EIT-NLP/Supervision-in-Latent-CoT}{this repository}.
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