LaSER (Latent Space Explicit Reasoning) is a self-distillation framework that internalizes explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning into the latent space of dense retrievers, enabling the model to "think silently" through continuous latent tokens.
LaSER-Qwen3-4B is a 4B-parameter dense retriever built on Qwen/Qwen3-4B.
Unlike standard dense retrievers that encode queries in a single forward pass, LaSER generates K continuous latent thinking tokens autoregressively in the embedding space:
Encode the input text into embeddings
At each thinking step, project the last hidden state through the LM head → softmax → compute a probability-weighted soft token from the embedding table
Append the soft token and repeat for K steps (using KV caching for efficiency)
Mean-pool the hidden states from all K thinking steps → L2 normalize
This enables complex reasoning while maintaining the inference efficiency of standard dense retrievers (~1.7× latency overhead, only ~0.3% of rewrite-then-retrieve pipelines).
LaSER-Qwen3-4B achieves a strong balance between performance and computational cost, outperforming 8B-scale standard dense retrievers while requiring significantly less compute.
@article{jin2026laser,
title={LaSER: Internalizing Explicit Reasoning into Latent Space for Dense Retrieval},
author={Jin, Jiajie and Zhang, Yanzhao and Li, Mingxin and Long, Dingkun and Xie, Pengjun and Zhu, Yutao and Dou, Zhicheng},
year={2026},
journal={arXiv preprint},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01425},
}
Files
13 files · 8.06 GBWeights 8.04 GB (safetensors). Sizes and sha256 from the signed manifest.
import os
os.environ["HF_ENDPOINT"] = "https://freeweights.allternit.com"
from transformers import AutoModel, AutoTokenizer
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Alibaba-NLP/LaSER-Qwen3-4B", revision="d22e8d383fcd7b2112d49a4cbba4cebb70d361f2")
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("Alibaba-NLP/LaSER-Qwen3-4B", revision="d22e8d383fcd7b2112d49a4cbba4cebb70d361f2", device_map="auto")