Meta's COCONUT 'Latent Reasoning' Debunked: Just Good Training, Not Hidden-State Reasoning
r/MachineLearning·medium signal
A controlled experiment on r/MachineLearning (119↑, 17cmts) tests Meta's COCONUT paper claim that models can reason in latent space by recycling hidden states. Results show the ~97% ProsQA performance is attributable to training quality, not latent reasoning — and recycled hidden states actually hurt generalization on out-of-distribution inputs. Important calibration for ML practitioners evaluating training techniques.