SpiralThinker: Latent Reasoning through an Iterative Process with Text–Latent Interleaving

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission471 Authors

Keywords: Latent Reasoning, Iterative Computation, Progressive Alignment

Abstract: Recent advances in large reasoning models have been driven by reinforcement learning and test-time scaling, accompanied by growing interest in latent rather than purely textual reasoning. However, existing latent reasoning methods lack mechanisms to ensure stable reasoning dynamics in latent space and a systematic way to interleave implicit and explicit reasoning. We introduce SpiralThinker, a unified framework that performs iterative updates over latent representations while enabling interleaved reasoning across latent and textual steps. At its core, SpiralThinker employs a progressive alignment objective and structured annotations to stabilize latent reasoning and maintain coherence with textual reasoning. Across mathematical, logical, and commonsense reasoning tasks, SpiralThinker achieves state-of-the-art performance among latent reasoning baselines. Detailed analyses reveal that both iteration and alignment are indispensable, the numbers of latent tokens and iterations exhibit dataset-specific optima, and appropriate alignment proves critical for an effective iterative process. Overall, SpiralThinker bridges iterative computation and latent reasoning, demonstrating that aligned iterative updates can reliably steer reasoning in the latent space.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Mathematical, Symbolic, Neurosymbolic, and Logical Reasoning

Research Area Keywords: Question Answering, Generation, Language Modeling

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 471