System-1.5 Reasoning: Traversal in Language and Latent Spaces with
  Dynamic Shortcuts
Authors: name: Xiaoqiang Wang; name: Suyuchen Wang; name: Yun Zhu; name: Bang Liu
Published: 2025-05-25 03:35:49

Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables large language models (LLMs) to move
beyond fast System-1 responses and engage in deliberative System-2 reasoning.
However, this comes at the cost of significant inefficiency due to verbose
intermediate output. Recent latent-space reasoning methods improve efficiency
by operating on hidden states without decoding into language, yet they treat
all steps uniformly, failing to distinguish critical deductions from auxiliary
steps and resulting in suboptimal use of computational resources. In this
paper, we propose System-1.5 Reasoning, an adaptive reasoning framework that
dynamically allocates computation across reasoning steps through shortcut paths
in latent space. Specifically, System-1.5 Reasoning introduces two types of
dynamic shortcuts. The model depth shortcut (DS) adaptively reasons along the
vertical depth by early exiting non-critical tokens through lightweight adapter
branches, while allowing critical tokens to continue through deeper Transformer
layers. The step shortcut (SS) reuses hidden states across the decoding steps
to skip trivial steps and reason horizontally in latent space. Training
System-1.5 Reasoning involves a two-stage self-distillation process: first
distilling natural language CoT into latent-space continuous thought, and then
distilling full-path System-2 latent reasoning into adaptive shortcut paths
(System-1.5 Reasoning). Experiments on reasoning tasks demonstrate the superior
performance of our method. For example, on GSM8K, System-1.5 Reasoning achieves
reasoning performance comparable to traditional CoT fine-tuning methods while
accelerating inference by over 20x and reducing token generation by 92.31% on
average.