ATLAS: Adaptive Test-Time Latent Steering with External Verifiers for Enhancing LLMs’ Reasoning

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission8737 Authors

Keywords: LLMs, latent reasoning, model steering

Abstract: Recent work on activation and latent steering has demonstrated that modifying internal representations can effectively guide large language models (LLMs) toward improved reasoning and efficiency without additional training. However, most existing approaches rely on fixed steering policies and static intervention strengths, which limit their robustness across problem instances and often result in over- or under-steering. We propose Adaptive Test-time Latent Steering, called ATLAS, a task-specific framework that dynamically controls steering decisions at inference time using an external, lightweight latent verifier. Given intermediate hidden states, the verifier predicts the quality of ongoing reasoning and adaptively selects whether and how strongly to apply steering, enabling per-example and per-step adjustment with minimal overhead. To our knowledge, ATLAS is the first method to integrate learned latent verification into test-time steering for enhancing LLMs' reasoning. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that ATLAS consistently outperforms both vanilla decoding and fixed steering baselines, achieving higher accuracy while substantially reducing test-time token usage. These results demonstrate that verifier-guided latent adaptation provides an effective and scalable mechanism for controlling reasoning efficiency without sacrificing solution quality. All source code will be publicly available.

Paper Type: Long

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

Research Area Keywords: LLMs Reasoning, Model Steering

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, Reproduction study, Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 8737