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

Temporal Recurrence Favors Fewer Layers

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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.

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