A Formal Comparison Between Chain of Thought and Latent Thought

ArXi:2509.25239v3 Announce Type: replace Chain of thought (CoT) elicits reasoning in large language models by explicitly generating intermediate tokens. In contrast, latent thought reasoning operates directly in the continuous latent space, enabling computation beyond discrete linguistic representations. While both approaches exploit iterative computation, their comparative capabilities remain underexplored. In this work, we present a formal analysis showing that latent thought admits efficient parallel computation than inherently sequential CoT.