Hybrid Reasoning Agents
cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-10-13
Updated: 2026-10-13
Comments: 45 pages, 12 figures
Code: https://github.com/togethercomputer/HybridAgent
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: How can we build an agent that thinks beyond human language, yet still acts through it in the external environment? Modern LLM agents still reason and interact through text, while latent reasoning
Abstract
How can we build an agent that thinks beyond human language, yet still acts through it in the external environment? Modern LLM agents still reason and interact through text, while latent reasoning offers an efficient internal medium but lacks native tool access and reasoning transparency. We bridge these two directions with Hybrid Reasoning Agents (HybridAgents), which dynamically navigate between latent reasoning and text-based interaction throughout a unified generation process. Architecturally, a lightweight HybridLink enables seamless transitions between text and latent modes, while the agent's continuous working memory preserves lossless hybrid context across multiple turns. These designs preserve tool-integrated agentic capabilities while making latent thoughts directly inspectable. Building on this architecture, we further develop dedicated post-training algorithms for hybrid reasoning: HybridSFT stabilizes tool-integrated hybrid generation by teaching the backbone to coordinate with HybridLink, then HybridRL scales reasoning by learning when to think in latent space and when to act through text. We evaluate HybridAgent at 3 model scales across 11 benchmarks covering mathematics, science, medicine, search, and agentic reasoning. Compared with frontier LLM Agents and agentic frameworks spanning both text-based and latent methods, HybridAgent consistently improves performance by 10.4%, while delivering 35.5%-54.7% token reduction, 1.8x-2.6x faster inference, and 2.7x-3.7x cost savings. Code and data are available at https://github.com/togethercomputer/HybridAgent.
Sources
- Monitoring Reasoning Models for Misbehavior and the Risks of Promoting Obfuscation
- Harnessing the Collective Intelligence of AI Agents in the Wild for New Discoveries
- Perception Tokens Enhance Visual Reasoning in Multimodal Language Models
- When Latent Agents Lie: KV-Cache Integrity in Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration
- Humanity's Last Exam
- Language Models are Hidden Reasoners: Unlocking Latent Reasoning Capabilities via Self-Rewarding
- Reasoning Beyond Language: A Comprehensive Survey on Latent Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
- Compressed Chain of Thought: Efficient Reasoning Through Dense Representations
- Exploring System 1 and 2 communication for latent reasoning in LLMs
- The Danger of Overthinking: Examining the Reasoning-Action Dilemma in Agentic Tasks
- Tool-Star: Empowering LLM-Brained Multi-Tool Reasoner via Reinforcement Learning
- Agentic Reinforced Policy Optimization
- DeepSearchQA: Bridging the Comprehensiveness Gap for Deep Research Agents
- Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space
- GPT-4o System Card
- Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning
- Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI Safety
- In-the-Flow Agentic System Optimization for Effective Planning and Tool Use
- Beyond tokens: a unified framework for latent communication in LLM-based multi-agent systems
- HyLaT: Efficient Multi-Agent Communication via Hybrid Latent-Text Protocol
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