[D] ran controlled experiments on meta's COCONUT and found the "latent reasoning" is mostly just good training. the recycled hidden states actually hurt generalization

COCONUT ( Hao, 2024 ) claims models can reason in latent space by recycling hidden states instead of writing chain-of-thought tokens. it gets ~97% on ProsQA vs ~77% for CoT. nobody controlled for the obvious alternative. maybe the multistage curriculum