ATLAS: Unified Agentic and Latent Visual Reasoning via Functional Tokens
ATLAS proposes a framework where a single discrete 'functional token' serves dual roles as both an agentic operation trigger and a latent visual reasoning unit in multimodal models. This design avoids the computational cost of generating intermediate images while sidestepping the context-switching latency of external tool calls and the generalization limitations of pure latent methods. The framework is compatible with standard SFT and RL training pipelines without architectural changes, and introduces Latent-Anchored GRPO (LA-GRPO) to stabilize reinforcement learning when functional tokens are sparse. Experiments show strong performance on visual reasoning benchmarks with maintained interpretability.
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ATLAS: Active learning framework for automated discovery of interpretable behavioral models in cognitive science
ATLAS (Active Theory Learning for Automated Science) is a new active learning framework that iterates between generating mechanistic hypotheses as sparse neural network ensembles and designing maximally informative experiments to distinguish between them. The system is tested on recovering reinforcement learning agents from behavioral data in bandit tasks, achieving 5-10x sample efficiency improvements over random experimentation and matching expert-designed experiments from the literature. The work targets automated scientific discovery in cognitive science, with potential generalization to other domains requiring mechanistic modeling.
NF-CoT: Latent reasoning with normalizing flows preserves autoregressive LLM advantages
Researchers propose NF-CoT, a latent reasoning framework that replaces discrete chain-of-thought token streams with continuous intermediate states modeled by normalizing flows embedded inside an LLM backbone. The approach uses a TARFlow-style normalizing flow head alongside the standard language model head, enabling exact likelihoods, KV-cache-compatible left-to-right decoding, and policy-gradient optimization in latent space. On code-generation benchmarks, NF-CoT improves pass rates over both explicit CoT and prior latent-reasoning baselines while reducing intermediate reasoning cost. The work addresses a key limitation of existing latent reasoning methods, which typically sacrifice probabilistic tractability or autoregressive compatibility.
VEPO: Vision-anchored token selection improves RL for visual reasoning
A new arXiv paper identifies a failure mode of entropy-based credit assignment in multimodal reinforcement learning: vision-sensitive tokens with naturally low entropy are systematically ignored, causing the mechanism to collapse in visual reasoning tasks. The authors propose VEPO (Vision-Entropy token-selection for Policy Optimization), which couples visual sensitivity with token entropy via a multiplicative scheme to redirect gradient credit toward tokens that are both visually grounded and semantically informative. VEPO outperforms entropy-only baselines by 2.28 points at 7B scale and 3.15 points at 3B scale on visual reasoning benchmarks.
Reasoning in Memory (RiM): Latent Reasoning via Working Memory Blocks in LLMs
RiM introduces a latent reasoning method that replaces autoregressive chain-of-thought token generation with fixed sequences of special 'memory block' tokens, allowing LLMs to perform internal computation without externalizing intermediate steps. These memory blocks are processed in a single forward pass rather than generated autoregressively, improving compute efficiency at test time. Training uses a two-stage curriculum: first grounding memory blocks by predicting explicit reasoning steps, then discarding step-level supervision and refining answers iteratively. Experiments across multiple model families and sizes show RiM matches or exceeds existing latent reasoning methods.
Introducing Activation Atlases
OpenAI and Google researchers jointly developed activation atlases, a new neural network interpretability technique that visualizes what interactions between neurons represent. The method aims to improve understanding of internal decision-making processes in AI systems. This work is positioned as a tool for identifying weaknesses and investigating failures in deployed AI systems.
Imaginative Perception Tokens improve spatial reasoning in vision-language models
Researchers introduce Imaginative Perception Tokens (IPT), intermediate perceptual representations that externalize what a VLM would perceive from alternative spatial viewpoints, enabling reasoning about unobserved spatial structure. The approach is evaluated on three new tasks—Perspective Taking, Path Tracing, and Multiview Counting—using ~20K examples built on the BAGEL backbone. IPT supervision consistently outperforms textual chain-of-thought training for spatial tasks, with the authors finding that forcing spatial computation through language can degrade performance, suggesting a modality mismatch. The work provides both a practical supervision technique and a diagnostic finding about the limits of language-mediated spatial reasoning.
STORM: Internalized Spatial-Temporal Reasoning for Video-Language Models via Latent Trajectories
STORMS is a two-stage training framework that teaches large vision-language models to perform spatial-temporal video reasoning through bounded continuous latent trajectories rather than explicit textual chain-of-thought, keyframe selection, or external tool use. In Stage I, latent tokens are aligned with thought-video representations derived from generated videos; in Stage II, answer-only supervision internalizes the reasoning process. At inference time, no video regeneration or frame reinsertion is required, reducing latency and engineering complexity. Evaluations on VideoMME, MVBench, TempCompass, and MMVU show improved accuracy with substantially lower inference overhead versus tool-based pipelines.
RA-RFT: Retrieval-Augmented Reinforcement Fine-Tuning teaches LLMs to reason by analogy
Researchers propose Retrieval-Augmented Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RA-RFT), a post-training framework that trains a retriever to rank contexts by expected reasoning benefit rather than semantic similarity, then fine-tunes a policy model via reinforcement learning using retrieved analogous demonstrations. The key insight is that reasoning-relevant retrieval surfaces complementary solution strategies rather than superficially similar problems. On mathematical reasoning benchmarks, RA-RFT improves AIME 2025 average@32 accuracy by 7.1 and 2.8 points over GRPO for Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen3-4B respectively, suggesting reasoning-aware retrieval is orthogonal to reward design and training curriculum improvements.