norn-v15

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Project Norn V15: Continuous Latent Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Dynamic Stochastic Recurrence

Technical Report & Reproducible Release • Osakra Research

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Abstract

Standard large language models perform complex multi-step reasoning by autoregressively generating explicit tokens into a visible textual scratchpad (Chain-of-Thought, CoT). While effective, this discrete paradigm incurs substantial token generation latency, quadratic key-value cache growth, and is constrained by vocabulary discretization bottlenecks. In this technical report, Osakra Research shares Project Norn V15, an exploratory 4.45-Billion parameter neuro-symbolic language model engineered to test Continuous Latent Chain-of-Thought (Latent CoT) reasoning directly within hidden representation space ($\mathbf{h} \in \mathbb{R}^d$) on consumer-grade local hardware.

We make no claims of outperforming massive 70B+ scale flagship models on open-ended general intelligence. Instead, this project investigates whether introducing Dynamic Stochastic Recurrence ($k \sim \mathcal{U}{2, 16}$), quadratic Attractor Drift Regularization ($\mathcal{L}_{\text{drift}}$), and continuous-time modulation from a Liquid Time-Constant (LTC) ODE brainstem and a Holographic Reduced Representation (HRR) associative memory engine can help a compact 4B-class model approach competitive performance on targeted structured reasoning tasks under modest local hardware constraints (< 4.5 GB active VRAM).

Across a 250-sample held-out evaluation suite (bundled directly with this release for complete reproducibility), Norn V15 achieves a Composite Evaluation Score of 71.6% (174 / 250 correct) under an Auto-Router policy, approaching or matching significantly larger models on structured arithmetic (76.0% GSM8K, $k=2$), collegiate STEM (65.0% MMLU, $k=8$), and algorithmic coding (72.0% CodeAlpaca, $k=4$). All weights, biological projections, inference code, and the complete 250-sample test suite are released openly under the Apache-2.0 license.

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1. Introduction & Research Scope

Verbalized Chain-of-Thought reasoning (Wei et al., 2022; Kojima et al., 2022) has demonstrated remarkable empirical success. However, generating visible reasoning tokens carries notable practical trade-offs:

1. Generation Latency: Emitting hundreds of intermediate tokens incurs sequential forward-pass latency.
2. KV-Cache Memory: Text scratchpads scale memory consumption quadratically with sequence length $\mathcal{O}(T^2)$.
3. Representation Bottleneck: Discretizing internal continuous states into vocabulary tokens restricts gradient-guided intermediate representations.

While prior research has explored recurrent internal deliberation (Goyal et al., 2021; Dohan et al., 2022), models often suffer from representation drift or collapse when recurrence depth exceeds a few steps. Project Norn V15 explores whether variable-depth stochastic training and attractor regularization can stabilize continuous deliberation across variable horizons ($k \in [2, 16]$) on a standard consumer laptop GPU.

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2. Mathematical Architecture Formulation

<div align="center"> <img src="./norn_architecture_diagram.png" width="800" alt="Project Norn V15 Neural Architecture" /> </div>

$$\mathbf{h}t^{(k)} = \mathcal{T}{\theta}(\mathbf{h}t^{(k-1)}) + \alpha \mathbf{W}{\text{ode}} \mathbf{z}{\text{ODE}}(t) + \beta \mathbf{W}{\text{hrr}} \mathbf{v}_{\text{HRR}}$$

1. Embedding Manifold: Input tokens $x_{1:t}$ are mapped to initial representations $\mathbf{h}t^{(0)} = \mathcal{E}(x{1:t}) \in \mathbb{R}^{t \times d}$.
2. Continuous Latent Deliberation: The final hidden state vector is recurrently fed back into the transformer layers for $k$ iterations before any token emission occurs.
3. Liquid Time-Constant (LTC) ODE Brainstem (Hasani et al., 2021): $$\frac{d\mathbf{z}(t)}{dt} = -\left[\frac{1}{\tau} + f(\mathbf{x}(t), \mathbf{\Theta})\right] \mathbf{z}(t) + A \cdot f(\mathbf{x}(t), \mathbf{\Theta})$$ where $\mathbf{z}_{\text{ODE}}(t) \in \mathbb{R}^{32}$ provides continuous temporal context to modulate transformer hidden representations.
4. Holographic Reduced Representations (HRR) (Plate, 2003): Associative concept binding is computed algebraically via circular convolution $\circledast$: $$\mathbf{v}_{\text{HRR}} = \mathbf{a} \circledast \mathbf{b} = \mathcal{F}^{-1}\Big(\mathcal{F}(\mathbf{a}) \odot \mathcal{F}(\mathbf{b})\Big)$$
5. Attractor Regularization: Manifold drift is constrained via a quadratic penalty: $$\mathcal{L}{\text{drift}} = \frac{1}{k} \sum{j=1}^k |\mathbf{h}_t^{(j)} - \mathbf{h}_t^{(0)}|_2^2$$
6. Auto-Router Entropy Policy:
   • Low-Entropy Closed-Form Queries (GSM8K Math, Rigid Tool JSON): Routed to $k=2$ (Flash Step) to commit to the target manifold before vector diffusion occurs.
   • High-Entropy Conceptual Questions (Collegiate MMLU): Routed to $k=8$ (Deep Deliberation) to allow multi-step candidate elimination.
   • Structural Synthesis (Coding, Analogies): Routed to $k=4$ (Balanced).

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3. Empirical Evaluation & Multi-Domain Benchmarks

All results were obtained on a local consumer laptop (RTX 4070 Laptop GPU, 4.45B model in 4-bit NF4, < 4.5 GB active VRAM).

3.1 Comparative Scorecard Across Model Scales

Evaluated on the bundled 250-sample held-out suite (evaluation_suite_250.json).

[!NOTE] As expected, large 70B+ frontier models retain a clear advantage on broad, unstructured general knowledge and open-domain comprehension. Norn's value is in demonstrating that a compact 4.45B model can achieve competitive structured accuracy within specific technical domains on consumer hardware.

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3.2 Comparison with Leading Sub-5B Compact Baselines

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4. The Core Discovery: Latent Compute Scaling as an Orthogonal Dimension

Contemporary artificial intelligence research is witnessing a fundamental transition in scaling laws:

1. Pre-training Scaling ($N, D$): Scaling model parameters and pre-training tokens (Kaplan et al., 2020; Hoffmann et al., 2022) yields diminishing marginal returns under severe power, data, and hardware constraints.
2. Test-Time Search in Token Space (OpenAI o1/o3; Snell et al., 2024): Demonstrates that allocating compute at inference time unlocks dramatic reasoning improvements. However, verbalizing reasoning into explicit textual tokens incurs severe penalties: quadratic key-value cache expansion ($\mathcal{O}(T^2)$), substantial generation latency, and the discrete vocabulary bottleneck.
3. The Latent Compute Frontier (Project Norn): Norn V15 demonstrates an alternative, orthogonal scaling paradigm: scaling continuous recurrence passes ($k$) within internal hidden vector space ($\mathbf{h} \in \mathbb{R}^d$).

4.1 Empirical Evidence: Domain-Dependent Deliberation Windows and Entropy Thresholds

Across 1,000 evaluation checkpoints from $k=0 \to 16$, analysis of the latent scaling trajectory reveals a critical, nuanced empirical dynamic: continuous latent compute does not scale uniformly across task archetypes, but exhibits domain-dependent optimal deliberation windows governed by task entropy:

• High-Entropy Exploratory Reasoning (Collegiate STEM MMLU): Scales monotonically with deeper deliberation, advancing from $26.7% \to 63.0% \to \mathbf{65.0%}$ at $k=8$ (+38.3% over zero-shot base) as extended recurrence enables iterative candidate hypothesis evaluation and distractor elimination before token emission.
• Closed-Form Precision (GSM8K Math): Peaks sharply at $k=2$ (82.0% vs 40.0% base). Because deterministic arithmetic tasks possess narrow, rigid attractor basins, brief deliberation rapidly snaps representations into the correct numerical manifold; over-deliberating ($k \ge 4$) induces vector diffusion and manifold drift that degrades performance (60.0% at $k=4$, 52.0% at $k=16$).
• Structural Code Synthesis (CodeAlpaca): Achieves its optimal trade-off under balanced deliberation at $k=4$ (72.0% vs 20.0% base), balancing syntactic AST structure against recurrence dispersion.
• Agentic Tool Execution (Live Sandbox Python): Sustains peak accuracy (85.0%) through $k=2$ and $k=4$, before degrading at deeper horizons ($k \ge 8$, 45.0%) due to schema drift in rigid JSON tool specifications.

Architectural Justification for the Auto-Router: Because closed-form arithmetic and rigid tool-calling decay when over-deliberated while exploratory collegiate STEM demands deep deliberation, static-depth recurrent models inevitably suffer performance decay on multi-domain evaluations (composite index steadily declines past $k=2$: $72.4% \to 68.0% \to 59.6% \to 54.5%$). Norn V15's Dynamic Deliberation Auto-Router dynamically evaluates task entropy to route queries to their domain-optimal depth, achieving a state-of-the-art 71.6% composite score without wasteful compute or representation collapse.

4.2 The Potential of Scaling to Larger Architectures

The central takeaway of Project Norn V15 is not merely the performance of this specific 4.45B model, but the scaling trajectory of continuous latent reasoning itself:

• Compute-to-Accuracy Efficiency: In discrete CoT, a model must generate ~500 tokens (~500 sequential forward passes) to reason through a complex problem. In Norn V15, just 2 to 8 internal latent iterations ($k \in [2, 8]$) achieve comparable or superior grounding at a fraction of the wall-clock latency and zero KV-cache overhead.
• The Open Horizon (14B, 32B, 70B+): If a modest 4.45B model running entirely on a single consumer laptop (< 4.5 GB VRAM) can close the gap to significantly larger baselines through latent deliberation, what happens when Continuous Latent CoT is trained on 14B, 32B, or 70B foundation backbones?
• Manifold Smoothness at Scale: Higher-dimensional models possess smoother latent representations and higher attractor capacity, suggesting that the dynamic stochastic regularization ($\mathcal{L}_{\text{drift}}$) proven here will scale with even greater stability on massive architectures. We release this model and dataset to encourage the community to explore this scaling frontier.

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5. Multi-Horizon Deliberation Sweep Reference Table

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6. Bundled Reproducible Evaluation Suite

To facilitate independent verification, the exact 250 evaluation samples and benchmark script are included directly in this repository:

• Dataset File: evaluation_suite_250.json (50 GSM8K math, 100 collegiate MMLU, 50 CodeAlpaca, 30 HRR analogies, 20 agentic sandbox tasks).
• Evaluation Script: run_benchmark.py.

How to Reproduce Locally:

python run_benchmark.py --suite evaluation_suite_250.json --steps auto

6.1 Data Integrity & Contamination Audit

To ensure scientific validity and verify zero test-set leakage, an automated multi-tier audit scanned all 250 evaluation samples across all 17 training corpus files (15,791 total training records) using exact substring matching, 12-gram sequence analysis, and 8-gram Jaccard similarity metrics:

*Note on MMLU: The single match (mmlu_31, quasar 3C9 physics problem) is due to an upstream duplicate in the official cais/mmlu dataset, occurring in both validation (#156) and test (#1440). Other detected 12-grams correspond to standard benchmark prompt templates (e.g., standard USMLE clinical framing).
**Note on CodeAlpaca: While the active training and evaluation partitions form a strictly disjoint split with zero overlap in active training, ancestral adapter checkpoints during initial pre-tuning had historical exposure to the broader open-source pool. We encourage independent evaluation on completely external benchmarks (e.g., HumanEval, EvalPlus).

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7. Model Architecture & Parameter Audit

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8. Quickstart & Usage

8.1 Installation

# Clone from Hugging Face:
git clone https://huggingface.co/Osakra/norn-v15
cd norn-v15

# Or clone from GitHub:
# git clone https://github.com/Osakra-Research/Norn.git
# cd Norn

pip install -r requirements.txt

8.2 Interactive Console (Auto-Mode Default)

python chat.py --steps auto

8.3 Python API Integration

import os
import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer, BitsAndBytesConfig
from peft import PeftModel
from norn_wrapper import HybridNornWrapperV4

device = "cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu"
target_dtype = torch.bfloat16 if device == "cuda" else torch.float32

bnb_config = BitsAndBytesConfig(
    load_in_4bit=True,
    bnb_4bit_compute_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
    bnb_4bit_quant_type="nf4"
) if device == "cuda" else None

base_model_id = "Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Base"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(base_model_id, trust_remote_code=True)
if tokenizer.pad_token is None:
    tokenizer.pad_token = tokenizer.eos_token

load_kwargs = {"device_map": "auto" if device == "cuda" else None, "trust_remote_code": True}
if bnb_config:
    load_kwargs["quantization_config"] = bnb_config
else:
    load_kwargs["torch_dtype"] = torch.float32

base_model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(base_model_id, **load_kwargs)
peft_model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(base_model, "./")

norn = HybridNornWrapperV4(
    peft_model=peft_model,
    embed_dim=base_model.config.hidden_size,
    ltc_dim=32,
    hrr_dim=256
)
norn.ode_proj.to(device=device, dtype=target_dtype)
norn.hrr_proj.to(device=device, dtype=target_dtype)

bio_state = torch.load("norn_biology_proj_v15.pt", weights_only=False, map_location=device)
norn.ode_proj.load_state_dict(bio_state['ode_proj'])
norn.hrr_proj.load_state_dict(bio_state['hrr_proj'])
norn.eval()

# Initialize biological context vectors (LTC ODE brainstem state & HRR associative vector)
ode_latent, hrr_vector = norn.init_bio_states(batch_size=1, device=device, dtype=target_dtype)

# Continuous Latent Deliberation via Auto-Router
prompt = "Question: Tracy used a 4-foot wire to support tomato plants. She cuts it into 6-inch pieces. How many pieces does she get?"
output_tokens = norn.generate_with_latent_cot(
    tokenizer=tokenizer,
    prompt=prompt,
    num_latent_steps="auto",
    max_new_tokens=256,
    ode_latent=ode_latent,
    hrr_vector=hrr_vector
)

print(tokenizer.decode(output_tokens[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

8.4 Running with LM Studio & Ollama (Universal Local API Adapter)

Project Norn V15 includes a dedicated local API adapter (norn_api_server.py) that implements both OpenAI and Ollama REST specifications with real-time streaming support. This allows frontends such as LM Studio, Ollama CLI, Open-WebUI, Cursor, or Continue to run Norn while preserving its full hybrid architecture (Continuous Latent CoT deliberation, LTC ODE brainstem modulation, and HRR associative memory):

1. Start the Universal Adapter Server

# Serves both OpenAI (/v1/chat/completions) and Ollama (/api/chat, /api/tags) protocols
python norn_api_server.py --port 11434 --steps auto

2. Connect LM Studio

• In LM Studio, go to Local Server / Developer Settings.
• Set endpoint: http://localhost:11434/v1
• Select model: norn-v15

3. Connect Ollama & Open-WebUI

• Any client configured for Ollama can point directly to http://localhost:11434.
• The model will appear as norn-v15:latest in ollama list and Open-WebUI model dropdowns.

4. Direct Ollama Modelfile Registration (Optional)

ollama create norn -f ./Modelfile
ollama run norn

5. Merging LoRA Weights for Standalone GGUF Export

python merge_lora.py --output_dir ./norn_v15_merged
# Convert to GGUF using llama.cpp:
# python llama.cpp/convert_hf_to_gguf.py ./norn_v15_merged --outfile norn-v15-q4_k_m.gguf

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9. References

1. Vaswani, A., et al. (2017). Attention is all you need. NeurIPS.
2. Wei, J., et al. (2022). Chain-of-thought prompting elicits reasoning in large language models. NeurIPS.
3. Hasani, R., et al. (2021). Liquid time-constant networks. AAAI.
4. Plate, T. A. (2003). Holographic Reduced Representations. CSLI Publications.
5. Hu, E. J., et al. (2021). LoRA: Low-rank adaptation of large language models. ICLR.
6. Dettmers, T., et al. (2023). QLoRA: Efficient finetuning of quantized LLMs. NeurIPS.
7. Cobbe, K., et al. (2021). Training verifiers to solve math word problems. arXiv:2110.14168.
8. Hendrycks, D., et al. (2020). Measuring massive multitask language understanding. ICLR.
9. Goyal, A., et al. (2021). Recurrent independent mechanisms. ICLR.
10. Dohan, D., et al. (2022). Language model cascades. arXiv:2207.10342.
11. Kojima, T., et al. (2022). Large language models are zero-shot reasoners. NeurIPS.
12. Chaudhary, S. (2023). Code Alpaca: An instruction-following LLaMA model for code generation.

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10. Citation

@misc{osakra_norn_v15_2026,
  title={Project Norn V15: Continuous Latent Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Dynamic Stochastic Recurrence},
  author={{Osakra Research}},
  year={2026},
  howpublished={\url{https://huggingface.co/Osakra/norn-v15}},
  note={Hugging Face Technical Report and Model Release}
}

Osakra Research