Token Assorted: Mixing Latent and Text Tokens for Improved Language
  Model Reasoning
Authors: name: DiJia Su; name: Hanlin Zhu; name: Yingchen Xu; name: Jiantao Jiao; name: Yuandong Tian; name: Qinqing Zheng
Published: 2025-02-05 15:33:00

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at reasoning and planning when trained on
chainof-thought (CoT) data, where the step-by-step thought process is
explicitly outlined by text tokens. However, this results in lengthy inputs
where many words support textual coherence rather than core reasoning
information, and processing these inputs consumes substantial computation
resources. In this work, we propose a hybrid representation of the reasoning
process, where we partially abstract away the initial reasoning steps using
latent discrete tokens generated by VQ-VAE, significantly reducing the length
of reasoning traces. We explore the use of latent trace abstractions in two
scenarios: 1) training the model from scratch for the Keys-Finding Maze
problem, 2) fine-tuning LLMs on this hybrid data with an extended vocabulary
including unseen latent tokens, for both logical and mathematical reasoning
problems. To facilitate effective learning, we introduce a simple training
procedure that randomly mixes latent and text tokens, which enables fast
adaptation to new latent tokens. Our approach consistently outperforms the
baselines methods in various benchmarks.