arXiv Machine Learning

What Makes Recurrence Effective in Looped Language Models?

arXiv AI
Sep 3

CHASE: Cache-Hole-Adapted Skip Exit for Looped State-Space Language Models

The paper introduces CHASE, a cache‑hole‑adapted skip‑exit mechanism for looped state‑space language models, specifically Looped Mamba and Looped Hybrid Mamba‑Transformer. It shows that looping these architectures improves performance on controlled reasoning tasks and remains competitive in pre‑training benchmarks while using fewer distinct parameters. The cache‑hole adaptation allows selective skipping of recurrent steps during inference, maintaining perplexity close to full computation and achieving significant speedups.

By Zhenxuan Yu, Takeshi Kojima, Yutaka Matsuo, Yusuke Iwasawa
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Recirculation

The paper introduces recirculation, an inference‑time architectural enhancement for foundation models that reduces perplexity and improves accuracy on generation and reasoning tasks without adding significant latency. Recirculation adds a specific form of recurrence, enabling the model to function as a dynamical system that tracks belief states, and is distinct from chain‑of‑thought or depth‑recurrence methods. An adaptive variant requires minimal hyperparameter tuning and achieves notable gains on the Gemma3 family, including a 23% perplexity drop and a 21% accuracy increase on GSM8k.

By Michael C. Mozer, Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui, Danny Sawyer, Sunny Sanyal, Rosanne Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Looped Language Models Improve Compositional Tool Calling

The paper investigates the use of looped language models for compositional tool calling, where models must coordinate multiple API calls and maintain state across interactions. Experiments on API-Bank, BFCL, and NESTful show that recurrent computation generally improves compositional and dependency-aware tool use, with accuracy increasing as recurrent depth grows. Adaptive inference offers a better compute‑performance trade‑off by allocating extra computation only when necessary.

By Andrei Cristian Popescu, Haitz S\'aez de Oc\'ariz Borde, Pietro Li\`o
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

RecurTrace: Adaptive Latent Reasoning with Loop-Time Memory

RecurTrace introduces adaptive latent reasoning for language models by allowing each looped layer to attend to its own past states and by using a halting head to decide when to stop iterating. This approach overcomes two limitations of prior latent recurrence methods: limited access to earlier computations and a fixed loop count that mismatches input difficulty. In experiments on MathQA, RecurTrace achieves 56.9% accuracy with an average of 2.0 loops, outperforming fixed‑depth baselines and other adaptive methods, and it also improves generation accuracy across a range of model sizes.

By Yuxiang Wang, Kunyu Feng, Yingda Shen, Haoning Xu, Junyu Wang, Zhizheng Wu
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Scheduling Recursive Reasoning in Looped Transformers

arXiv:2609.36653v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recurrent reasoning models have attracted growing attention for scaling test-time computation, typically by iteratively refining latent states with sha...

By Boyuan Wang, Chengyao Yu, Jiaxi Ren, Hongxin Wei, Bingyi Jing, Yuxin Tao
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Attention Routing Stabilizes Early: Working-Set Inference for Recurrent Language Models

The paper investigates how attention dynamics evolve across recurrent depth in language models, finding that attention support stabilizes early while hidden states and outputs take longer. It proposes WISE, a training‑free method that uses full attention in early steps and then reuses the discovered sparse working set for later steps, preserving performance on multi‑hop QA tasks. Experiments show that WISE maintains quality up to 2K context, offers measurable speedups, and highlights the importance of recurrent discovery of attention support.

By Ke Wan, Chen Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

Allocating Recurrent Compute in Looped Language Models

The paper proposes MixerLoop, a looped language model that repeats only the Gated DeltaNet mixer while applying the dense feed‑forward network (FFN) once, instead of repeating the entire layer stack. Using Iterative Transport Rank (ITR) to measure cross‑position influence, the authors show that MixerLoop retains most of the performance gains of full recurrence while reducing FLOPs by 45.9%. Experiments on 15M and 110M parameter models demonstrate that MixerLoop outperforms full‑block recurrence on aggregate CORE metrics.

By Ruhai Lin, Yiyang Guo, Rui-Jie Zhu, Hao Ye, Jason K. Eshraghian
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Temporal Recurrence Favors Fewer Layers

The paper investigates how temporal recurrence affects the required depth of neural networks in streaming tasks. By treating depth, expert width, and parallel experts as a compute‑allocation problem, the authors compare recurrent and non‑recurrent models across various compute budgets. Experiments on Sokoban and FineWeb language modeling show that recurrence shifts the optimal compute allocation toward fewer layers while maintaining or improving performance.

By Ivan Anokhin, Johan Obando-Ceron, Irina Rish, Sebastian Risi