Scratchpad

A temporary reasoning space, often hidden from the user, is referred to as a scratchpad in the context of language models. This mechanism allows the model to perform intermediate reasoning steps before arriving at a final output. The scratchpad can be conceptualized as an auxiliary memory that stores intermediate calculations or thought processes, facilitating more complex reasoning tasks. Mathematically, this can be represented as a state transition model, where the model iteratively updates its internal state based on the information processed in the scratchpad. This technique is particularly relevant in transformer architectures, where attention mechanisms can be utilized to reference previous states and enhance the coherence of the final output. The use of scratchpads is an emerging area of research in AI, as it enables models to handle more intricate tasks that require multi-step reasoning.