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Arnau Padrés Masdemont

Publications and source records attributed to Arnau Padrés Masdemont.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

From Chain-of-Thought to Loops: Non-Autoregressive Latent Reasoning via Looped Transformers

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning often improves language-model performance by giving models additional computation before answering. However, explicit CoT expresses this computation as a sequence of autoregressively generated tokens. Latent reasoning replaces these tokens with compact continuous states, but most autoregressive latent-reasoning methods retain a left-to-right dependency among latent vectors. We introduce LLoCoT: a looped latent-reasoning framework that replaces left-to-right latent generation with iterative refinement of a compact latent workspace. A shared transformer is reapplied for a small number of refinement iterations, jointly updating the latent slots based on the prompt and the evolving workspace state. Using the refined state, a probabilistic head predicts a distribution from which latent tokens are sampled in parallel and used to condition an autoregressive decoder for answer generation. Training uses continuous representations derived from explicit CoT together with a final-answer prediction loss and likelihood-based supervision of the latent states. Across HumanEval and MBPP, LLoCoT achieves the highest mean among the evaluated methods, performing on par in accuracy with Reasoning SFT, our explicit-CoT baseline, while outperforming the base model, answer-only SFT and NF-CoT. Relative to Reasoning SFT, LLoCoT reduces time to the first answer token by approximately $36\times$ and reasoning-phase latency by approximately $42\times$, while increasing end-to-end throughput by $9.2\%$. This design replaces serial thought generation with parallel latent-slot refinement while retaining probabilistic latent modeling and autoregressive answer decoding.

cs.AI↗

Enabling Dynamic Computation in Looped LMs

Looped LMs are parameter efficient and promise dynamic computation (saving memory and FLOPs on easy tokens). However, state-of-the-art open Looped LMs trained with this dynamic computation capability (Ouro models) do not realize it in practice as each loop iteration (depth) requires its own level of KV-cache, necessitating all loop computations. Moreover, Ouro's early-exit prior is enforced on each token equally, which results in static lower-depth like processing of all tokens regardless of difficulty. In this work, we propose a simple "best-available" KV caching strategy that works out-of-the-box, creating a new frontier in the performance vs depth space. Our approach enables up to 30% reduction in FLOPs and KV memory while retaining full-depth performance, showing the true flexibility of Looped LMs. Furthermore, training looped LMs with awareness about this KV caching strategy improves performance and efficiency. Finally, we apply a small but effective fix to the early-exit prior enforcement objective that makes tokens exit at truly heterogeneous depths based on effort. Our findings are validated on Ouro models as well as smaller looped LMs pre-trained from scratch.

cs.AI↗

No Answer Needed: Predicting LLM Answer Accuracy from Question-Only Linear Probes

Do large language models (LLMs) anticipate when they will answer correctly? To study this, we extract activations after a question is read but before any tokens are generated, and train linear probes to predict whether the model's forthcoming answer will be correct. Across three open-source model families ranging from 7 to 70 billion parameters, projections on this "in-advance correctness direction" trained on generic trivia questions predict success in distribution and on diverse out-of-distribution knowledge datasets, indicating a deeper signal than dataset-specific spurious features, and outperforming black-box baselines and verbalised predicted confidence. Predictive power saturates in intermediate layers and, notably, generalisation falters on questions requiring mathematical reasoning. Moreover, for models responding "I don't know", doing so strongly correlates with the probe score, indicating that the same direction also captures confidence. By complementing previous results on truthfulness and other behaviours obtained with probes and sparse auto-encoders, our work contributes essential findings to elucidate LLM internals.

cs.CL↗

M3Kang: Evaluating Multilingual Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Despite state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities, their performance in multilingual mathematical reasoning remains underexplored, particularly when compared to human performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce M3Kang, the first massively multilingual, multimodal mathematical reasoning dataset for VLMs. It is derived from the Kangaroo Math Competition, the world's largest mathematics contest, which annually engages over six million participants under the age of 18 across more than 90 countries. M3Kang includes 1,747 unique multiple-choice problems organized by grade-level difficulty, with translations into 108 culturally diverse languages, some of them including diagrams essential for solving them. Using this dataset, we conduct extensive benchmarking on both closed- and open-source SOTA models. We observe that, despite recent advances, models still struggle with basic math and diagram-based reasoning, with performance scaling with language presence and model size, but not with grade level. We also find that multilingual techniques can be effectively extended to the multimodal setting, resulting in significant improvements over baseline approaches. Our analysis also incorporates performance data from over 68,000 students, enabling direct comparison with human performance. We are open-sourcing M3Kang, including the English-only subset M2Kang, along with the framework and codebase used to construct the dataset.

cs.CL↗