← 首页|学术|Think in Latent, Explain in Language: Self-Explainable Latent Reasoning
cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · 2608.13570 · 2026/07/01

Think in Latent, Explain in Language: Self-Explainable Latent Reasoning

Zhao, Dayuan, Cao, Shengcao, Wang, Yu-Xiong, Gui, Liang-Yan
TL;DR:SELR 统一框架:单模型同时做高效隐式推理与内在可解释。Answer Loss 优化潜在推理轨迹产出正确终答,CoT Loss 训练同一模型把自己的隐表示解码回可读推理步骤——不需要外部解码器。LLM 与 VLM 均验证。

🎯 问题

隐式推理(如 Coconut)把思考压进嵌入,效率高但不可读;post-hoc 解码器(如 Heima)解释与真实推理脱钩且引入架构开销——可解释性与效率二选一。

🔬 方法

SELR 多任务训练目标:Answer Loss(潜在轨迹→正确终答)+ CoT Loss(同一模型把隐表示解码为人类可读步骤),让潜在表示既任务有效又语义可解释。
章节结构(全文标题提取):
Acknowledgements
Impact Statement

📊 结果

在 LLM 与 VLM 上均验证有效,证明单一模型可同时做到高效隐式推理与内在可解释,省去外部解码器。

💡 与研究方向关联

推理效率与可解释的平衡点——隐式推理的「黑箱」问题有了单模型自解释方案,对 agent 推理栈设计有意义。

📝 原文摘要

▶ 原文摘要 Abstract
Latent reasoning has emerged as a powerful alternative to text-based Chain-of-Thought (CoT), offering significant gains in computational efficiency by compressing verbose reasoning into compact embeddings. However, compressing reasoning into the latent space renders the thinking opaque, hindering its interpretability. Current methods present a stark trade-off: they either function as unexplainable ''black boxes'' (e.g., Coconut), where the latent reasoning is not human-readable, or rely on separate post-hoc decoders for explainability (e.g., Heima), introducing architectural overhead and decoupling the explanation from the actual reasoning process. In this work, we present a unified framework for Self-Explainable Latent Reasoning (SELR) that trains a single model to perform efficient and inherently explainable latent reasoning. Our core contribution is a novel multi-task training objective that optimizes for two goals simultaneously: (1) an Answer Loss that optimizes the latent reasoning trajectory to produce accurate final answers, and (2) a CoT Loss that explicitly trains the same model to decode its own latent representations back into human-understandable reasoning steps. This design ensures that generated latent representations are both task-effective and semantically interpretable, eliminating the need for external decoders. We validate the effectiveness of SELR on both Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), demonstrating that SELR achieves superior token efficiency and accuracy compared to baselines, while uniquely providing self-contained explainability without auxiliary models. Project page is available at https://jasondayuan.github.io/SELR/.
Deep Read · 2026-08-18高松灯 / Agent 日报
Latent ReasoningExplainabilitySelf-ExplainCoT