LatentChem: From Textual CoT to Latent Thinking in Chemical Reasoning
Chemical large language models (LLMs) predominantly rely on explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) in natural language to perform complex reasoning. However, chemical reasoning is inherently continuous and structural, and forcing it into discrete linguistic tokens introduces a fundamental representation mismatch that constrains both efficiency and performance. We introduce LatentChem, a latent reasoning interface that decouples chemical computation from textual generation, enabling models to perform multi-step reasoning directly in continuous latent space while emitting language only for final outputs. Remarkably, we observe a consistent emergent behavior: when optimized solely for task success, models spontaneously internalize reasoning, progressively abandoning verbose textual derivations in favor of implicit latent computation. This shift is not merely stylistic but computationally advantageous. Across diverse chemical reasoning benchmarks, LatentChem achieves a 59.88\% non-tie win rate over strong CoT-based baselines on ChemCoTBench, while delivering a 10.84times average inference speedup. Our results provide empirical evidence that chemical reasoning is more naturally and effectively realized as continuous latent dynamics rather than discretized linguistic trajectories.
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Xinwu Ye
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2026-02-10T09:06:51.472Z
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Xinwu Ye
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user
XinwuYe
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Yicheng Mao
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Jia Zhang
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Yimeng Liu
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2026-02-10T09:06:48.819Z
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Yoyo Liu
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yoyoliuuu
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Li Hao
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Fang Wu
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Zhiwei Li
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Yuxuan Liao
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Zehong Wang
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Zhiyuan Liu
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Zhenfei Yin
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2026-02-10T09:06:53.788Z
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Zhenfei Yin
JeremyYin
user
JeremyYin
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Li Yuan
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Philip Torr
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Huan Sun
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Xiangxiang Zeng
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Mengdi Wang
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Le Cong
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Shenghua Gao
698a9b8d1b2dc6b37d61af2c
Xiangru Tang
LatentChem: From Textual CoT to Latent Thinking in Chemical Reasoning
Chemical large language models (LLMs) predominantly rely on explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) in natural language to perform complex reasoning. However, chemical reasoning is inherently continuous and structural, and forcing it into discrete linguistic tokens introduces a fundamental representation mismatch that constrains both efficiency and performance. We introduce LatentChem, a latent reasoning interface that decouples chemical computation from textual generation, enabling models to perform multi-step reasoning directly in continuous latent space while emitting language only for final outputs. Remarkably, we observe a consistent emergent behavior: when optimized solely for task success, models spontaneously internalize reasoning, progressively abandoning verbose textual derivations in favor of implicit latent computation. This shift is not merely stylistic but computationally advantageous. Across diverse chemical reasoning benchmarks, LatentChem achieves a 59.88\% non-tie win rate over strong CoT-based baselines on ChemCoTBench, while delivering a 10.84times average inference speedup. Our results provide empirical evidence that chemical reasoning is more naturally and effectively realized as continuous latent dynamics rather than discretized linguistic trajectories.
LatentChem enables chemical reasoning through continuous latent space computations instead of discrete textual tokens, achieving superior performance and efficiency compared to traditional chain-of-thought approaches.
chemical large language models Chain-of-Thought latent reasoning continuous latent space textual generation multi-step reasoning ChemCoTBench inference speedup