RuPLaR: Efficient Latent Compression of LLM Reasoning Chains with Rule-Based Priors From Multi-Step to One-Step

The Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm, while enhancing the interpretability of Large Language Models (LLMs), is constrained by the inefficiencies and expressive limits of natural language. Latent Chain-of-Thought (latent CoT) reasoning, which operates in a continuous latent space, offers a promising alternative but faces challenges from structural complexities in existing multi-step or multi-model paradigms, such as error propagation and coordination overhead. In this paper, we introduce One-Model One-Step, a novel compression framework for Latent Reasoning with Rule-Based Priors(RuPLaR) to address this challenge. Our method trains an LLM to autonomously generate latent reasoning tokens in a single training stage, guided by rule-based prior probability distributions, thereby eliminating cascaded processes and inter-model dependencies. To ensure reasoning quality, we design a joint training objective that enforces answer consistency via cross-entropy, aligns soft token distributions with rule-based priors via KL divergence (the Soft Thinking constraint), and adds a problem-thought semantic alignment constraint in the representation space. Extensive experiments show that our compression framework not only improves accuracy by 11.03% over existing latent CoT methods on GSM8k-Aug but also achieves this with minimal token usage, underscoring its effectiveness and extensibility. Code: https://github.com/xiaocen-luo/RuPLaR.