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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.
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Speaker effects in language comprehension: An integrative model of language and speaker processing

arXiv:2412.07238v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The identity of a speaker influences language comprehension through modulating perception and expectation. This review explores speaker effects and proposes an integrative model of language and speaker processing that integrates distinct mechanistic perspectives. We argue that speaker effects arise from the interplay between bottom-up perception-based processes, driven by acoustic-episodic memory, and top-down expectation-based processes, driven by a speaker model. We show that language and speaker processing are functionally integrated through multi-level probabilistic processing: prior beliefs about a speaker modulate language processing at the phonetic, lexical, and semantic levels, while the unfolding speech and message continuously updates the speaker model, refining broad demographic priors into precise individualized representations. Within this framework, we distinguish between speaker-idiosyncrasy effects arising from familiarity with an individual and speaker-demographics effects arising from social group expectations. We discuss how speaker effects serve as indices for assessing language development and social cognition, and we encourage future research to extend these findings to the emerging domain of artificial intelligence (AI) speakers, as AI agents represent a new class of social interlocutors that are transforming the way we engage in daily communication.
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MedLA: A Logic-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Complex Medical Reasoning with Large Language Models

arXiv:2509.23725v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Answering complex medical questions requires not only domain expertise and patient-specific information, but also structured and multi-perspective reasoning. Existing multi-agent approaches often rely on fixed roles or shallow interaction prompts, limiting their ability to detect and resolve fine-grained logical inconsistencies. To address this, we propose \textsc{MedLA}, a logic-driven multi-agent framework built on large language models. Each agent organizes its reasoning process into an explicit logical tree based on syllogistic triads (major premise, minor premise, and conclusion), enabling transparent inference and premise-level alignment. Agents engage in a multi-round, graph-guided discussion to compare and iteratively refine their logic trees, achieving consensus through error correction and contradiction resolution. We demonstrate that \textsc{MedLA} consistently outperforms both static role-based systems and single-agent baselines on challenging benchmarks such as MedDDx and standard medical QA tasks. Furthermore, \textsc{MedLA} scales effectively across both open-source and commercial LLM backbones, achieving state-of-the-art performance and offering a generalizable paradigm for trustworthy medical reasoning.
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Limited Reasoning Space: The cage of long-horizon reasoning in LLMs

arXiv:2602.19281v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The test-time compute strategy, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), has significantly enhanced the ability of large language models to solve complex tasks like logical reasoning. However, empirical studies indicate that simply increasing the compute budget can sometimes lead to a collapse in test-time performance when employing typical task decomposition strategies such as CoT. This work hypothesizes that reasoning failures with larger compute budgets stem from static planning methods, which hardly perceive the intrinsic boundaries of LLM reasoning. We term it as the Limited Reasoning Space hypothesis and perform theoretical analysis through the lens of a non-autonomous stochastic dynamical system. This insight suggests that there is an optimal range for compute budgets; over-planning can lead to redundant feedback and may even impair reasoning capabilities. To exploit the compute-scaling benefits and suppress over-planning, this work proposes Halo, a model predictive control framework for LLM planning. Halo is designed for long-horizon tasks with reason-based planning and crafts an entropy-driven dual controller, which adopts a Measure-then-Plan strategy to achieve controllable reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that Halo outperforms static baselines on complex long-horizon tasks by dynamically regulating planning at the reasoning boundary.
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Comparing and Integrating Different Notions of Representational Correspondence in Neural Systems

arXiv:2509.21628v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The extent to which different biological and artificial neural systems rely on equivalent internal representations to support similar tasks remains a central question in neuroscience and machine learning. Prior work typically compares systems using a single representational similarity metric, even though different metrics emphasize distinct facets of representational correspondence. Here we evaluate a suite of representational similarity measures by asking how well each metric recovers known structure across two domains: for artificial models, whether procedurally dissimilar models (differing in architecture or training paradigm) are assigned lower similarity than procedurally matched models; and for neural data, whether responses from distinct cortical regions are separated while responses from the same region align across subjects. Across both vision models and neural recordings, metrics that preserve representational geometry or tuning structure more reliably separate this structure than more flexible mappings such as linear predictivity. To integrate these complementary facets, we adapt Similarity Network Fusion, originally developed for multi-omics integration, to combine similarity graphs across metrics. The resulting fused similarity yields sharper separation of procedurally defined model families and, when applied to neural data, recovers a clearer hierarchical organization of the ventral visual stream that aligns more closely with established anatomical and functional hierarchies than single metrics. Overall, this approach reveals which dimensions of representational correspondence recover meaningful structure in models and brains, and how complementary notions of similarity can be integrated.
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