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Hauptverfasser: Yang, Chenxiao, Srebro, Nathan, Li, Zhiyuan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02112
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author Yang, Chenxiao
Srebro, Nathan
Li, Zhiyuan
author_facet Yang, Chenxiao
Srebro, Nathan
Li, Zhiyuan
contents Modern language models reason within bounded context, an inherent constraint that poses a fundamental barrier to long-horizon reasoning. We identify recursion as a core principle for overcoming this barrier, and propose recursive models as a minimal realization, where the model can recursively invoke itself to solve subtasks in isolated contexts. We prove that any computable problem admits a recursive decomposition in which each subtask requires only exponentially smaller active context than standard autoregressive models; this strictly surpasses any context management approach confined to a single sequence, such as summarization. We further generalize our framework to modern agentic systems with arbitrary context processing and control flows, and prove that recursive models can achieve optimal power within this broader class. Experimentally, we train a 3B model to reason recursively and evaluate on Boolean satisfiability, a task requiring long-horizon combinatorial search, where it significantly outperforms frontier LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02112
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Recursive Models for Long-Horizon Reasoning
Yang, Chenxiao
Srebro, Nathan
Li, Zhiyuan
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Modern language models reason within bounded context, an inherent constraint that poses a fundamental barrier to long-horizon reasoning. We identify recursion as a core principle for overcoming this barrier, and propose recursive models as a minimal realization, where the model can recursively invoke itself to solve subtasks in isolated contexts. We prove that any computable problem admits a recursive decomposition in which each subtask requires only exponentially smaller active context than standard autoregressive models; this strictly surpasses any context management approach confined to a single sequence, such as summarization. We further generalize our framework to modern agentic systems with arbitrary context processing and control flows, and prove that recursive models can achieve optimal power within this broader class. Experimentally, we train a 3B model to reason recursively and evaluate on Boolean satisfiability, a task requiring long-horizon combinatorial search, where it significantly outperforms frontier LLMs.
title Recursive Models for Long-Horizon Reasoning
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02112