Thinking into the Future: Latent Lookahead Training for Transformers

This paper was accepted at the Workshop on Latent & Implicit Thinking – Going Beyond CoT Reasoning 2026 at ICLR.

Autoregressive language models trained with next-token prediction generate text by sampling one discrete token at a time. Although very scalable, this objective forces the model to commit at every step, preventing it from exploring or reflecting upon multiple plausible continuations. Furthermore, the compute allocation across tokens is uniform; every token is formed based on a single forward-pass, potentially limiting the model’s expressiveness in cases where difficult tokens require inherently more compute. Towards addressing these limitations, we introduce latent lookahead, a training strategy that enables models to “think” before generating: at selected positions in the sequence, before committing to the next token, the model performs a multi-step lookahead in latent space. More precisely, instead of sampling future tokens, we leverage the network’s latent space by recursively feeding its hidden states back into the context for τ steps, investing more compute on predicting that token. This produces τ latent predictions that are supervised against the next τ ground-truth tokens, encouraging the model to “lookahead” and refine its prediction. We show that latent lookahead substantially outperforms both autoregressive and non-autoregressive baselines on planning tasks such as maze solving, Sudoku, and ProsQA, where foresight is essential.

• ** Work done while at Apple