85.7CLMay 27
CIRF: Tokenizing Chain-of-Thoughts into Reusable Functional Units for Efficient Latent Reasoning in Large Language ModelsYukyung Lee, Yumeng Shen, Jinhyeong Park et al.
Implicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reduces the inference cost of large language models by internalizing the explicit rationales. However, existing approaches typically lack alignment with explicit rationales and adaptivity to example complexity. In this work, we propose CIRF (\textit{\underline{C}hain-of-thoughts \underline{I}nto \underline{R}eusable \underline{F}unctional units}), an implicit CoT framework that performs reasoning as a dynamic sequence of discrete functional tokens. CIRF assigns a functional token to each semantically coherent reasoning unit in explicit CoT traces. The model is then fine-tuned to autoregressively generate functional tokens and their optional results, followed by the final answer. This design aligns latent reasoning with a sequence of functional units, facilitating parallel training, explicit rationale alignment, and adaptive reasoning. Extensive experiments on mathematical, symbolic, and commonsense reasoning benchmarks show that CIRF provides a favorable accuracy-latency trade-off compared with state-of-the-art implicit CoT methods. Further analyses demonstrate that CIRF constructs distinct, interpretable functional tokens, leading to consistent performance improvements.
84.2AIMay 15
Recall Isn't Enough: Bounding Commitments in Personalized Language SystemsRui Tang, Yichi Zhang, Xi Chen et al.
Long-context and memory systems usually treat personalization as a recall problem. In practice, many failures occur later, when a system commits: it turns noisy hints into hard constraints, drops rare witnesses, forgets downstream obligations, or answers despite infeasibility. We introduce Contract-Bounded Evidence Activation (CBEA) with Lexicographic Commitment Validation (LCV). CBEA activates a bounded evidence set using typed coverage, tail witnesses, and consequence debt; LCV validates structured commitments before prose and routes infeasible states to repair, abstention, or recontract. Across 360 fixtures and three generation backends, CBEA+LCV reaches zero failures within validator scope at 0.49-0.60 availability over attempted runs. Raw and long-context baselines with the same LCV gate reach zero only at 0.003-0.092. A shadow oracle diagnostic marks the limit: CBEA+LCV recalls 0.012 of uncompiled visible facts, while raw recalls 0.53. The result is a bounded operating point: explicit commitment control and 74-75% lower median input payload, not universal memory dominance.