Resample the Answer: Where to Spend Test-Time Compute in Recursive Reasoning
Recursive reasoning models such as the Tiny Recursive Model (TRM) iteratively refine two latent states: an answer state y, decoded into the output, and a reasoning state z, which is never decoded. Many of their failures have been attributed to bad basins, regions of latent space that trap the recursion on wrong answers. Recent test-time approaches perturb y, z or both to recover these failures, but the impact of this choice on performance, test-time compute efficiency and scaling properties remains unclear. Through controlled experiments on TRM, we find that a failed trajectory carries its failure in its answer state. At equal compute, in depth and in width, resampling y recovers more fai...
| Authors | Maxime Illouz |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 12 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 October 2026 |
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