AI RESEARCH

How Far Ahead Do LLMs Plan? Uncovering the Latent Horizon in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

arXiv CS.LG

ArXi:2602.02103v2 Announce Type: replace Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become a central mechanism for eliciting multi-step reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet recent evidence presents a tension: hidden states appear to already encode future reasoning before CoT fully unfolds, while explicit steps still remain crucial for tasks requiring compositional computation.