How Many Thoughts Can a Vector Hold? The Capacity of Reasoning by Superposition

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2609.13747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models solve hard problems through intermediate computations across multi-step reasoning. Traditional chain-of-thought encodes these computations as tokens. Recent continuous and recurrent methods instead move partial computations into fixed-dimensional latent states, where a single thought can superpose multiple alternatives. This raises a fundamental design question:what should continuous thoughts preserve as reasoning proceeds? An intuitive approach discards past computations and keeps only the current reasoning frontier. Storing more items seems to dilute states and waste limited representational capacity. We show this intuition can be incorrect. Under identical downstream computations, cumulative superposition retaining fu