Learn Your Own Thoughts: Abstract Token Curriculum
Quick summary
arXiv:2609.19717v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable reasoning capabilities by utilizing chain-of-thought (CoT) as a scratchpad for intermediate stages of thinking. However, CoT techniques require explicit supervision on thinking tokens, which requires rich, task-specific data. In this work, we propose Abstract Token Curriculum (ATC), a novel curriculum learning framework that elicits effective continuous intermediate representations without direct supervision or manual scratchpad design. ATC gradually increases problem complexity through a se
Key takeaways
- arXiv:2609.19717v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable reasoning capabilities by utilizing chain-of-thought (CoT) as a scratchpad for intermediate stages of thinking.
- However, CoT techniques require explicit supervision on thinking tokens, which requires rich, task-specific data.
- In this work, we propose Abstract Token Curriculum (ATC), a novel curriculum learning framework that elicits effective continuous intermediate representations without direct supervision or manual scratchpad design.
Why it matters
“Learn Your Own Thoughts: Abstract Token Curriculum” should be evaluated beyond branding and benchmark scores. Its practical importance will emerge in task accuracy, latency, unit cost, safety and integration with real workflows.

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