LaDiR：潜在扩散模型增强 LLM 的文本推理能力

LaDiR: Latent Diffusion Enhances LLMs for Text Reasoning

AI 导读

研究团队提出LaDiR推理框架，将连续潜在表征的表达能力与潜在扩散模型的迭代优化能力相结合，以增强现有大语言模型的推理性能。该框架首先构建一个结构化的潜在推理空间，通过扩散过程对潜在状态进行迭代细化，使模型能够全局性地重新审视和修正推理路径中的早期内容。这种方法突破了传统自回归解码在整体优化和多样化解决方案探索方面的限制，提升了链式思维生成的质量与效率。

推荐理由

Apple 把扩散模型塞进 LLM 推理链，思路很野，用连续潜空间替代自回归 token 生成来解决「写到一半没法回头改」的老毛病。做推理优化或 diffusion 架构的值得细看，但离工程落地还远。

正文

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate their reasoning ability through chain-of-thought (CoT) generation. However, LLM’s autoregressive decoding may limit the ability to revisit and refine earlier tokens in a holistic manner, which can also lead to inefficient exploration for diverse solutions. In this paper, we propose LaDiR (Latent Diffusion Reasoner), a novel reasoning framework that unifies the expressiveness of continuous latent representation with the iterative refinement capabilities of latent diffusion models for an existing LLM. We first construct a structured latent reasoning space using a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that encodes text reasoning steps into blocks of thought tokens, preserving semantic information and interpretability while offering compact but expressive representations. Subsequently, we utilize a latent diffusion model that learns to denoise a block of latent thought tokens with a blockwise bidirectional attention mask, enabling longer horizon and iterative refinement with adaptive test-time compute. This design allows efficient parallel generation of diverse reasoning trajectories, allowing the model to plan and revise the reasoning process holistically. We conduct evaluations on a suite of mathematical reasoning and planning benchmarks. Empirical results show that LaDiR consistently improves accuracy, diversity, and interpretability over existing autoregressive, diffusion-based, and latent reasoning methods, revealing a new paradigm for text reasoning with latent diffusion.

† University of California, San Diego