Reasoning to Learn from Latent Thoughts
Authors: name: Yangjun Ruan; name: Neil Band; name: Chris J. Maddison; name: Tatsunori Hashimoto
Published: 2025-03-24 16:41:23

Abstract: Compute scaling for language model (LM) pretraining has outpaced the growth
of human-written texts, leading to concerns that data will become the
bottleneck to LM scaling. To continue scaling pretraining in this
data-constrained regime, we propose that explicitly modeling and inferring the
latent thoughts that underlie the text generation process can significantly
improve pretraining data efficiency. Intuitively, our approach views web text
as the compressed final outcome of a verbose human thought process and that the
latent thoughts contain important contextual knowledge and reasoning steps that
are critical to data-efficient learning. We empirically demonstrate the
effectiveness of our approach through data-constrained continued pretraining
for math. We first show that synthetic data approaches to inferring latent
thoughts significantly improve data efficiency, outperforming training on the
same amount of raw data (5.7\% rightarrow 25.4\% on MATH). Furthermore, we
demonstrate latent thought inference without a strong teacher, where an LM
bootstraps its own performance by using an EM algorithm to iteratively improve
the capability of the trained LM and the quality of thought-augmented
pretraining data. We show that a 1B LM can bootstrap its performance across at
least three iterations and significantly outperform baselines trained on raw
data, with increasing gains from additional inference compute when performing
the E-step. The gains from inference scaling and EM iterations suggest new
opportunities for scaling data-constrained pretraining.