English

Parallel Test-Time Scaling for Latent Reasoning Models

Computation and Language 2026-04-21 v4 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Parallel test-time scaling (TTS) is a pivotal approach for enhancing large language models (LLMs), typically by sampling multiple token-based chains-of-thought in parallel and aggregating outcomes through voting or search. Recent advances in latent reasoning, where intermediate reasoning unfolds in continuous vector spaces, offer a more efficient alternative to explicit Chain-of-Thought, yet whether such latent models can similarly benefit from parallel TTS remains open, mainly due to the absence of sampling mechanisms in continuous space, and the lack of probabilistic signals for advanced trajectory aggregation. This work enables parallel TTS for latent reasoning models by addressing the above issues. For sampling, we introduce two uncertainty-inspired stochastic strategies: Monte Carlo Dropout and Additive Gaussian Noise. For aggregation, we design a Latent Reward Model (LatentRM) trained with step-wise contrastive objective to score and guide latent reasoning. Extensive experiments and visualization analyses show that both sampling strategies scale effectively with compute and exhibit distinct exploration dynamics, while LatentRM enables effective trajectory selection. Together, our explorations open a new direction for scalable inference in continuous spaces. Code and checkpoints released at https://github.com/ModalityDance/LatentTTS

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.07745,
  title  = {Parallel Test-Time Scaling for Latent Reasoning Models},
  author = {Runyang You and Yongqi Li and Meng Liu and Wenjie Wang and Liqiang Nie and Wenjie Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.07745},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted at ACL 2026 Main Conference

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:25:41.261Z