The Illusion of Superposition? A Principled Analysis of Latent Thinking in Language Models

ArXi:2604.06374v1 Announce Type: cross Latent reasoning via continuous chain-of-thoughts (Latent CoT) has emerged as a promising alternative to discrete CoT reasoning. Operating in continuous space increases expressivity and has been hypothesized to enable superposition: the ability to maintain multiple candidate solutions simultaneously within a single representation. Despite theoretical arguments, it remains unclear whether language models actually leverage superposition when reasoning using latent CoTs. We investigate this question across three regimes: a.