Form Follows Function: Recursive Stem Model

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Hakimi, Navid
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Hakimi, Navid
author_facet Hakimi, Navid
contents Recursive reasoning models such as Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM) and Tiny Recursive Model (TRM) show that small, weight-shared networks can solve compute-heavy and NP puzzles by iteratively refining latent states, but their training typically relies on deep supervision and/or long unrolls that increase wall-clock cost and can bias the model toward greedy intermediate behavior. We introduce Recursive Stem Model (RSM), a recursive reasoning approach that keeps the TRM-style backbone while changing the training contract so the network learns a stable, depth-agnostic transition operator. RSM fully detaches the hidden-state history during training, treats early iterations as detached "warm-up" steps, and applies loss only at the final step. We further grow the outer recursion depth $H$ and inner compute depth $L$ independently and use a stochastic outer-transition scheme (stochastic depth over $H$) to mitigate instability when increasing depth. This yields two key capabilities: (i) $>20\times$ faster training than TRM while improving accuracy ($\approx 5\times$ reduction in error rate), and (ii) test-time scaling where inference can run for arbitrarily many refinement steps ($\sim 20,000 H_{\text{test}} \gg 20 H_{\text{train}}$), enabling additional "thinking" without retraining. On Sudoku-Extreme, RSM reaches 97.5% exact accuracy with test-time compute (within ~1 hour of training on a single A100), and on Maze-Hard ($30 \times 30$) it reaches ~80% exact accuracy in ~40 minutes using attention-based instantiation. Finally, because RSM implements an iterative settling process, convergence behavior provides a simple, architecture-native reliability signal: non-settling trajectories warn that the model has not reached a viable solution and can be a guard against hallucination, while stable fixed points can be paired with domain verifiers for practical correctness checks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_15641
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Form Follows Function: Recursive Stem Model
Hakimi, Navid
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Recursive reasoning models such as Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM) and Tiny Recursive Model (TRM) show that small, weight-shared networks can solve compute-heavy and NP puzzles by iteratively refining latent states, but their training typically relies on deep supervision and/or long unrolls that increase wall-clock cost and can bias the model toward greedy intermediate behavior. We introduce Recursive Stem Model (RSM), a recursive reasoning approach that keeps the TRM-style backbone while changing the training contract so the network learns a stable, depth-agnostic transition operator. RSM fully detaches the hidden-state history during training, treats early iterations as detached "warm-up" steps, and applies loss only at the final step. We further grow the outer recursion depth $H$ and inner compute depth $L$ independently and use a stochastic outer-transition scheme (stochastic depth over $H$) to mitigate instability when increasing depth. This yields two key capabilities: (i) $>20\times$ faster training than TRM while improving accuracy ($\approx 5\times$ reduction in error rate), and (ii) test-time scaling where inference can run for arbitrarily many refinement steps ($\sim 20,000 H_{\text{test}} \gg 20 H_{\text{train}}$), enabling additional "thinking" without retraining. On Sudoku-Extreme, RSM reaches 97.5% exact accuracy with test-time compute (within ~1 hour of training on a single A100), and on Maze-Hard ($30 \times 30$) it reaches ~80% exact accuracy in ~40 minutes using attention-based instantiation. Finally, because RSM implements an iterative settling process, convergence behavior provides a simple, architecture-native reliability signal: non-settling trajectories warn that the model has not reached a viable solution and can be a guard against hallucination, while stable fixed points can be paired with domain verifiers for practical correctness checks.
title Form Follows Function: Recursive Stem Model
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15641