Invariant-Measure Reasoners: Stable Representations for Latent Reasoning

Abstract:Latent reasoning models repeatedly update a latent state using the same recurrent block. As the recurrent depth increases, the sequence of latent states may converge to a compact subset of the state space without necessarily converging to a fixed point. Existing models typically predict by applying a prediction head to a single latent state. However, the latent state can continue to change even after many updates, potentially making predictions unstable across recurrent depths. To address this instability, we introduce invariant-measure reasoners (ImR), a framework that uses an invariant measure as a stable representation. This measure describes the long-run distribution of latent states on the compact subset and is invariant under updates by the recurrent block. ImR predicts from the expectation of the prediction head's output under this measure. We use ImR in two ways: fine-tuning only the prediction head of existing models and training models from scratch. Both approaches reduce prediction instability and improve accuracy in many settings on maze and Sudoku tasks. In some settings, models trained with ImR exhibit non-fixed-point behavior more frequently than existing models yet achieve high accuracy even with such behavior, unlike existing models. These results suggest that ImR can leverage otherwise destabilizing dynamics for latent reasoning.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.10996 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.10996v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.10996 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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