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The Latent Space: Foundation, Evolution, Mechanism, Ability, and Outlook

arXiv:2604.02029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent space is rapidly emerging as a native substrate for language-based models. While modern systems are still commonly understood through explicit token-level generation, an increasing body of work shows that many critical internal processes are more naturally carried out in continuous latent space than in human-readable verbal traces. This shift is driven by the structural limitations of explicit-space computation, including linguistic redundancy, discretization bottlenecks, sequential inefficiency, and semantic loss. This survey aims to provide a unified and up-to-date landscape of latent space in language-based models. We organize the survey into five sequential perspectives: Foundation, Evolution, Mechanism, Ability, and Outlook. We begin by delineating the scope of latent space, distinguishing it from explicit or verbal space and from the latent spaces commonly studied in generative visual models. We then trace the field's evolution from early exploratory efforts to the current large-scale expansion. To organize the technical landscape, we examine existing work through the complementary lenses of mechanism and ability. From the perspective of Mechanism, we identify four major lines of development: Architecture, Representation, Computation, and Optimization. From the perspective of Ability, we show how latent space supports a broad capability spectrum spanning Reasoning, Planning, Modeling, Perception, Memory, Collaboration, and Embodiment. Beyond consolidation, we discuss the key open challenges, and outline promising directions for future research. We hope this survey serves not only as a reference for existing work, but also as a foundation for understanding latent space as a general computational and systems paradigm for next-generation intelligence.

Meta-Learning at Scale for Large Language Models via Low-Rank Amortized Bayesian Meta-Learning

arXiv:2508.14285v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a cost-effective way to incorporate information from a specific dataset. However, when a problem requires incorporating information from multiple datasets - as in few shot learning - generalization across datasets can be limited, driving up training costs. As a consequence, other approaches such as in-context learning are typically used in this setting. To address this challenge, we introduce an efficient method for adapting the weights of LLMs to multiple distributions, Amortized Bayesian Meta-Learning for LoRA (ABMLL). This method builds on amortized Bayesian meta-learning for smaller models, adapting this approach to LLMs by reframing where local and global variables are defined in LoRA and using a new hyperparameter to balance reconstruction accuracy and the fidelity of task-specific parameters to the global ones. ABMLL supports effective generalization across datasets and scales to large models such as Llama3-8B and Qwen2-7B, outperforming existing methods on the CrossFit and Unified-QA datasets in terms of both accuracy and expected calibration error. We show that meta-learning can also be combined with in-context learning, resulting in further improvements in both these datasets and legal and chemistry applications.
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