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-Qwen3-8B is the flagship 8B-parameter dense retriever built on Qwen/Qwen3-8B, achieving state-of-the-art performance on reasoning-intensive retrieval benchmarks.
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 โ softmax โ 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 โ L2 normalize
This enables complex reasoning while maintaining the inference efficiency of standard dense retrievers (~1.7ร latency overhead, only ~0.3% of rewrite-then-retrieve pipelines).
LaSER achieves the best performance while incurring only ~1.7ร latency over the basic retriever, compared to ~130ร for rewrite-then-retrieve pipelines.
@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
15 files ยท 16.4 GBWeights 16.4 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-Qwen3-8B", revision="b91380c35ca3c518b8ae1d4910aec8b561bcc9f0")
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("Alibaba-NLP/LaSER-Qwen3-8B", revision="b91380c35ca3c518b8ae1d4910aec8b561bcc9f0", device_map="auto")