Thoughts-as-Planning: Latent World Models for Chain-of-Thoughts Optimization via Reinforcement Planning
Researchers introduce Thoughts-as-Planning, a novel framework that optimizes reasoning chains in large language models by modeling them as sequential decision-making processes over a latent semantic space. The method uses learned world models to simulate how edits to reasoning chains affect outputs, enabling efficient planning through gradient descent or reinforcement learning while supporting multi-scale abstraction across token, segment, and instruction levels.