Internalizing Chain-of-thought into Looped Transformers

Abstract

Chain-of-thought (CoT) enables constant-bit-size transformers to perform general-purpose computation through generated tokens (Li and Wang, 2025a), whereas looped transformers carry out the same computation by recurrence in hidden states (latent thought). We construct a family of constant-bit-size looped transformers that interpolates between CoT and latent thought. For a prescribed loop count $L=L(n)$ and a fixed integer $k\ge1$ satisfying $s(n)^{1/k}=Ω(L)$, our transformer simulates a time-$t(n)$, space-$s(n)$ Turing machine using a context window of $O(s(n)/L)$ and $O(t(n)s(n)^{1/k}/L)$ generated tokens, reducing both resources by a factor of $L$ relative to the corresponding unlooped queue-machine simulation. The construction also holds with softmax attention at constant bit-size, under the finite-precision kernel specified in this paper.