The Illustrated Recurrence: From Amari-Hopfield Nets to GPT-6 Astra
Some notes on recurrence in machine learning by Günter Klambauer, September 2026
I have noticed that recurrence keeps getting reinvented or at least used in various forms in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The basic form of recurrence is:
\[x^{l+1} = F(x^l),\]where $F$ can be a neural network, a layer, or a block of layers, which is applied repeatedly to its own output. Figure 1 summarizes all architectures discussed below. Before I continue: my view on recurrence is likely biased and incomplete. For a detailed investigation of this topic, I refer to the great and very complete overview by Jürgen Schmidhuber: Deep Learning in Neural Networks: An Overview.
For neural networks, recurrence is written in terms of a hidden state $h^l$, an input $x$, a layer or block $f$, and its weights $w$:
\[h^{l+1} = f(h^l, x; w)\]The weights carry no index, because every step uses the same weights. $F$ denotes a whole neural network. Throughout, “recurrence” means sequential reuse: step $l+1$ consumes the result of step $l$. Weight sharing alone is not recurrence (see Section 0.2), and “tied” means “shared”.
What follows sorts neural network architectures by writing down what is being iterated, and which weights are shared. There turn out to be four cases, plus the no-recurrence baseline:
- 0. No recurrence: $h^{l+1} = f(h^l; w_l)$
- 1. Recurrence along time: $h^{t+1} = f(h^t, x^t; w)$
- 2. Recurrence of the whole network: $x^{l+1} = F(x^l; w)$
- 3. Recurrence along depth: $h^{l+1} = f(h^l; w)$
- 4. Whole-network and depth recurrence: both loops nested, e.g. HRM, TRM, and SE-RRM
The difference between categories 2 and 3 is where the loop closes. In whole-network recurrence the output of the network becomes its next input. In depth recurrence the loop runs over hidden states inside a single forward pass, often with untied layers around it. Note that these categories are not mutually exclusive. There are also networks which use $h^{t+1} = f(h^t; w)$, which would fall into categories 1 and 3 ($l$ interpreted as time). This blog focuses on depth and time as the main axes to distinguish architectures. Further axes are gradient truncation, stopping strategy, and input injection. Section 3.8 touches on the first two.
0. No recurrence
0.1 Deep Neural Networks: Highway-nets, ResNet and many other architectures
Classic neural networks, and especially deep networks, like deep MLPs, Highway networks or ResNets, have a layered structure:
\[y = F(x;w) = f_L( \ldots f_2( f_1(x; w_1); w_2) \ldots; w_L) = f_L \circ \cdots \circ f_2 \circ f_1 (x)\]where all of these layers or blocks $f_l(h^l; w_l)$ have different weights $w_l$ with potentially completely different sizes. That each layer or block has completely different weights is actually remarkable, since these $f_l$ have very similar structure and could in principle share weights (Figure 2). Hence, these neural networks map inputs to outputs without any recurrence, $y = F(x; w)$, where $w = [w_1,\ldots, w_L]$ collects the weights of all layers.
0.2 Transformer LLMs like GPT, Llama, DeepSeek, etc.
Large language models (LLMs) based on the Transformer, like GPT (Radford et al., 2018; Brown et al., 2020), Llama, or DeepSeek, map multiple input tokens $(x^1, \ldots, x^T)$ to one output token $x^{T+1}$. Same as in Section 0.1: the $L$ layers or blocks each have their own weights $w_l$, and the forward pass visits each exactly once (Figure 3). There is no weight sharing across depth and no recurrence.
Sebastian Raschka’s LLM architecture gallery collects over a hundred current open-weight LLMs, from GPT-2 to Llama 3, Qwen3, DeepSeek V3, Gemma, Mistral, GLM, Kimi and OLMo. Almost all of them fall into this category: a stack of structurally identical Transformer blocks, each with its own weights, visited exactly once per forward pass. What varies across the gallery is the attention variant (grouped-query attention, multi-head latent attention, sliding-window attention), the placement of the normalization layers, and whether the feed-forward block is dense or a mixture of experts. None of that changes the weight-sharing picture. Even the inter-layer hybrids that swap some attention layers for Mamba-2 or linear-attention layers, such as Nemotron 3 or Qwen3-Next, only add recurrence along time inside individual layers (Section 1.2). Along depth they stay untied.
One caveat, because it causes trouble later. A Transformer does share weights across positions: the same projections run at every token. That is weight sharing, but not recurrence: positions are computed in parallel and step $t$ does not consume step $t-1$.
1. Recurrence along time
1.1 RNNs/LSTM
Recurrent neural networks (e.g. Elman, 1990) apply the recurrence to the hidden representation $h^t$, consuming one sequence element $x^t$ per step:
\[h^{t+1} = f(h^t, x^t; w)\]LSTM (Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997) carries a cell state with an additive, ungated path through time, $c^{t+1} = c^t + i^t \odot g^t$, where $i^t$ is the input gate and $g^t$ the cell input. The later forget gate (Gers et al., 2000) made this path gated. Remember this path for the depth section. LSTMs also powered the first large-scale neural language models (Jozefowicz et al., 2016). Figure 4 shows two stacked recurrent layers.
1.2 Linear-state layers: mLSTM, GLA, Gated DeltaNet, Mamba
At inference, linear-state layers run like classic RNNs, one step per token, in time linear in the sequence length. Their state update is linear in the state, however. Hence, the updates for all time steps can be computed in parallel during training, e.g. by a parallel scan or in chunks. Their ancestor is the Fast Weight Programmer (Schmidhuber, 1991; Schlag et al., 2021): unnormalised linear attention is, up to notation, a fast-weight memory, and DeltaNet descends directly from that line. These architectures stack several such layers, and the layers do not share weights with each other (Figure 5). The sharing is inside each layer, along time. Some recent LLMs, like Qwen3-Next, are inter-layer hybrids: some linear-state layers, some classic attention layers.
1.3 Learning to Think (Schmidhuber 2015, Sec. 5.3)
Learning to Think is an approach in which two RNNs interact, i.e. it uses recurrence along the time axis. It predates latent reasoning by a decade.
Two recurrent networks interact, a controller $C$ with state $c^t$ and a world model $M$ with state $m^t$ (Figure 6):
\[c^{t+1} = f_C(c^t, m^t; w_C)\]The world model evolves by its own recurrence with weights $w_M$. $C$ learns to send self-generated vector queries into $M$ and read vector answers back, explicitly not in natural language, explicitly to replace millisecond-by-millisecond rollout planning with abstract iteration. Each network shares its own weights across $t$, and they do not share with each other. The sequence being recurred over is internal, not read from the input. This is latent reasoning, i.e. reasoning without emitting tokens, ten years before the term.
2. Whole-network recurrence
Whole-network recurrence feeds the output of a neural network back as its next input:
\[x^{l+1} = F(x^l; w),\]where $F$ is a whole neural network with weights $w$, and the weights are shared across iterations. Nothing is tied within $F$, and its internal layers can be as heterogeneous as you like. What repeats is $F$ entire.
2.1 Deep Equilibrium Models (Bai, Kolter & Koltun 2019)
Instead of running the iteration step by step, DEQs solve for the fixed point $z^\star$ directly:
\[z^\star = F(z^\star, x; w)\]with a root-finding algorithm such as Broyden’s method. The gradient is computed at the solution via the implicit function theorem. Hence, no iterates are stored, and memory is constant in the number of iterations. Classic GNNs already used fixed-point formulations. DEQ generalized the equilibrium-network perspective and provided a particularly clean implicit-differentiation formulation.
DEQ could also belong to Section 3. The function $F$ can be a whole network, as drawn in Figure 7, or a single weight-tied layer. In the second case, a DEQ is the modern form of the Almeida-Pineda nets of Section 3.2.
2.2 AlphaFold2 recycling (Jumper et al., 2021)
AlphaFold2 runs the entire Evoformer-plus-structure trunk, feeds the predicted structure back in as input, and repeats (Figure 8). At inference, three recycling passes follow the first pass, four passes in total. The internal blocks all have their own weights. It is $F$ as a whole that repeats, while its internal depth is largely untied. During training, the number of passes is sampled at random, and gradients flow only through the last pass.
2.3 Diffusion and Flow Matching (Ho et al., 2020; Lipman et al., 2023)
Both denoising diffusion and flow matching can also be viewed under this perspective: their sampling procedure iteratively uses a forward pass through a whole neural network (Figure 9). One neural network, typically a U-Net or a diffusion Transformer, is re-applied at every denoising or integration step and conditioned on the step index. The step conditioning matters: without it the iterations would be indistinguishable. Unlike AlphaFold2, training never unrolls this chain. Each step is trained separately against a regression target.
3. Recurrence along depth
Let us recall the layered structure of deep neural networks (as above):
\[y = f_L( \cdots f_2( f_1(x) )) = f_L \circ \cdots \circ f_2 \circ f_1 (x)\]Notably, these consecutive layers or blocks in modern architectures often have the same structure and size:
\[h^{l+1} = h^l + f_l(h^l; w_l)\]so different layers could share the same weights $w$. The following architectures do exactly this: different layers or blocks with the same structure use the same set of weights, called weight sharing.
Note that the construction of the layers seems to come from ResNets, but originally this is the construction in LSTM: the constant error carousel is the same additive identity path, along time instead of depth. Highway Networks (Srivastava, Greff & Schmidhuber 2015) carried the LSTM gating into the depth dimension explicitly, and ResNet is the ungated special case.
3.1 Amari-Hopfield networks
Some of the earliest neural networks we know, Amari networks and Hopfield networks, already use recurrence: they consist of just one linear layer, followed by the sign function, that is applied until convergence to binary patterns (Figure 10). Their state is also their output. Hence, Amari-Hopfield networks are the case in which recurrence along depth and whole-network recurrence coincide.
3.2 Input-constant recurrent neural networks (Almeida-Pineda nets)
Almeida-Pineda (Almeida, 1987; Pineda, 1987) bridges recurrence along time with recurrence along depth. Written out it is
\[h^{t+1} = f(h^t, x; w)\]which is the RNN equation with $x^t \equiv x$: the input is clamped, i.e. held constant and injected at every iteration, and the network runs until its state stops changing (Figure 11).
The index looks like time, but nothing arrives at each step, so it is refinement rather than time. If $x$ enters only at the first step, the update becomes $h^{l+1} = h^l + K(h^l)$ with $K$ the residual branch. Applied $L$ times, this is the weight-shared ResNet of Section 3.4, and the only difference is whether $x$ is re-injected. Hence, the Almeida-Pineda net can also be viewed as recurrence along depth:
\[h^{l+1} = f(h^l, x; w)\]3.3 Classic graph neural networks (Scarselli et al. 2009)
Classic graph neural networks (GNNs) apply the same local transition function $f_w$ at every node, over and over, until the node states reach a fixed point (Figure 12). The transition function is constrained to be a contraction, which guarantees a unique fixed point. A readout layer with its own weights maps the final node states to the output. Modern message-passing GNNs, such as graph convolutional networks (GCN) and graph attention networks (GAT), are the opposite: distinct weights per layer, no recurrence at all.
3.4 Weight-shared ResNet (Liao & Poggio 2016)
Liao and Poggio observed that a weight-shared ResNet is exactly a recurrent net with an identity skip: unroll $h^{l+1} = K(h^l) + h^l$ and you get a deep residual stack with tied weights, fold it and you get a shallow RNN. Empirically, 187k shared parameters matched 778k unshared on CIFAR-10, and 8.4M shared came within a couple of points of 29M unshared on ImageNet. Their multi-stage version ties within each stage but not between stages (Figure 13), and they found sharing helped in the first stage and slightly hurt in later ones.
3.5 Universal Transformer (Dehghani et al. 2019)
Universal Transformer (UT) ties a single attention-plus-transition block across all steps and adds a timestep embedding at every step, so the iterations are distinguishable (Figure 14). Adaptive computation time (ACT) picks the step count per position. ALBERT (Lan et al. 2020) uses a similar tying with the count fixed at the layer count and no halting. For several years, ALBERT was the most widely used encoder with shared weights across depth.
3.6 Looped Transformers (Giannou et al. 2023; Geiping et al. 2025)
Giannou et al. (2023) showed that a looped Transformer can emulate a programmable computer. Geiping et al. (2025) scaled the idea to language models and placed a tied core block $R$ between an untied prelude $P$ and an untied coda $C$ (Figure 15):
\[e = P(x),\quad s^i = R(e, s^{i-1}) \quad \text{for}\ i = 1 \ldots r, \quad p = C(s^r)\]$e$ is injected at every iteration, as in Almeida-Pineda nets (Section 3.2) and unlike the weight-shared ResNet (Section 3.4). $r$ is sampled during training and can be turned up at inference. Gradients propagate through only the last $k = 8$ passes.
3.7 Looped language models
Mixture-of-Recursions (Bae et al. 2025) is the same shared block with the loop count made per token: a lightweight router assigns each token $t$ its own $r_t$, so easy tokens exit after one pass and hard ones keep going. Like ACT in the Universal Transformer, it chooses the depth per position, but it uses a learned router instead of a halting unit. It comes with a matching key-value cache: only the tokens still active at loop step $i$ have their keys and values stored. It is also the paper Nanbeige cites for its looped architecture, so this is the line that actually reached production.
In production. Modern LLMs have many Transformer blocks with the same structure, which makes them ideal candidates for recurrently applying the same block. Until recently, no production decoder LLM did: in the gallery, every block of these stacks, from about 16 to more than 120 blocks, has its own weights, and the spare parameters went into mixture-of-experts, which buys capacity without buying depth. Nanbeige4.2-3B broke that, pretrained from scratch on 28T tokens and running its 22-layer stack twice for 44 layers of effective depth from one copy of the weights (Figure 16). Their ablation says two passes were the sweet spot, retaining about 75% of the token efficiency of an untied stack, while three or more bought almost nothing. Ouro does something similar, with deep supervision at every loop end.
GPT-6 Astra was reported in September 2026 to use a constrained looped architecture (Figure 17), though OpenAI has not confirmed it and the system card says nothing about architecture. If that report is right, the reason to care is not parameter efficiency. A loop that runs in latent space produces reasoning that leaves no token trace. This removes part of what chain-of-thought monitoring, i.e. reading the reasoning tokens of a model, depends on.
3.8 Fixed point, or fixed count? Truncated backprop or not?
Almeida-Pineda nets, classic GNNs and DEQs run to convergence. AlphaFold2 and looped Transformers run a fixed number of steps. Diffusion also runs a fixed number of steps but avoids the gradient problem, since each step is trained separately. This split cuts across Sections 2 and 3, and it is really a split about gradients.
Running to a fixed point buys you the implicit function theorem: differentiate at the solution, forget the path. Running a fixed count means you either pay memory linear in the number of iterations for backpropagation through the iterations, or you have to approximate. HRM (Section 4) keeps only the first term of the Neumann series of the implicit gradient, a one-step gradient. Looped Transformers truncate to the last $k$ passes. AlphaFold2 switches the gradient off for all passes but the last. Three methods, one problem, three sizes of the same shortcut.
There is also a reason not to converge. Once the state stops moving, further iterations do nothing and the useful depth caps out below the nominal one. Whether you want the fixed point or want to stay away from it is the central tension in this whole family.
4. Whole-network and depth recurrence: HRM, TRM, SE-RRM
These architectures combine both loops: weight sharing along depth, and repetition of the whole network.
HRM (Wang et al. 2025) has a low-level module $f_\mathrm{L}$ and a high-level module $f_\mathrm{H}$:
\[\begin{aligned} z_\mathrm{L}^{i} &= f_\mathrm{L}(z_\mathrm{L}^{i-1}, z_\mathrm{H}^{i-1}, x; w_\mathrm{L}), \\ z_\mathrm{H}^{i} &= \begin{cases} f_\mathrm{H}(z_\mathrm{H}^{i-1}, z_\mathrm{L}^{i}; w_\mathrm{H}) & \text{if } i \bmod T = 0,\\ z_\mathrm{H}^{i-1} & \text{otherwise,}\end{cases} \qquad i = 1,\ldots,NT. \end{aligned}\]Following Wang et al., $T$ is the number of low-level steps per high-level update and $N$ the number of cycles. The upright subscripts L and H name the low-level and the high-level module. $f_\mathrm{L}$ is tied across the $T$ steps inside a cycle, and the pair is repeated for $N$ cycles, that is depth recurrence (Figure 18). The whole network is then re-run as a segment under deep supervision, with the state detached between segments, that is whole-network recurrence. The result is an effective depth of $N \cdot T$ from two weight sets, with 27M parameters and about 1000 training examples per task. The high-level update $z_\mathrm{H}$ can be interpreted as a mechanism that periodically changes the conditioning seen by the low-level loop. This may prevent the low-level loop from simply settling into the same trajectory.
TRM (Jolicoeur-Martineau 2025) then showed the two-module split was not the critical part: one shared network with 7M parameters reaches 44.6% test accuracy on ARC-AGI-1, compared with 40.3% for HRM. SE-RRM (Freinschlag et al. 2026) adds symbol equivariance: a permutation of the input symbols permutes the output symbols in the same way. As a result, the recurrence generalizes to grids and alphabets it never saw. SE-RRM trained on 9×9 Sudoku extrapolates down to 4×4 and up to 16×16 and 25×25 with 2M parameters. A new axis of weight sharing, aside from time and depth: symbols.
This leaves the field in an odd place. The smallest neural networks here are getting the most out of recurrence, and the largest are only now starting to employ recurrence.
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Notation
| Symbol | Meaning | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Indices and counts | ||
| $l$ | depth or layer index; also the iteration index of whole-network recurrence | Intro, Sections 0, 2, 3 |
| $t$ | time step or token position | Sections 0.2, 1, 3.2 |
| $i$ | loop index | Sections 3.6, 3.7, 4 |
| $L$ | number of layers or depth steps | Sections 0, 3; ×L in the figures |
| $T$ | sequence length | Sections 0.2, 1; ×T in the figures |
| $T$ | number of low-level steps per high-level update (HRM) | Section 4 |
| $N$ | number of high-level cycles (HRM) | Section 4; ×N in Figure 18 |
| $r$, $r_t$ | number of loop iterations; per token $t$ (Mixture-of-Recursions) | Sections 3.6, 3.7; ×r in the figures |
| $k$ | number of final loop passes that receive gradients | Sections 3.6, 3.8 |
| Inputs, states, and outputs | ||
| $x$ | input | throughout |
| $x^t$ | input element or token at time $t$ | Sections 0.2, 1 |
| $x^l$ | network output fed back as the next input (whole-network recurrence) | Intro, Section 2 |
| $y$ | output | Section 0.1 |
| $h^l$, $h^t$ | hidden state at depth $l$ or time $t$ | throughout |
| $c^t$ | LSTM cell state; also the controller state (Learning to Think) | Sections 1.1, 1.3 |
| $i^t$ | LSTM input gate | Section 1.1 |
| $g^t$ | LSTM cell input | Section 1.1 |
| $m^t$ | world-model state (Learning to Think) | Section 1.3 |
| $z^\star$ | fixed point (DEQ) | Section 2.1 |
| $z_\mathrm{L}^i$, $z_\mathrm{H}^i$ | low-level and high-level state (HRM) | Section 4 |
| $e$ | prelude output, injected at every loop step (looped Transformer) | Section 3.6 |
| $s^i$ | state after loop step $i$ (looped Transformer) | Section 3.6 |
| $p$ | coda output (looped Transformer) | Section 3.6 |
| Networks, layers, and blocks | ||
| $F$ | whole neural network | throughout |
| $f$, $f_l$ | layer or block; $f_l$ with its own weights | throughout |
| $f_w$ | local transition function (classic GNN) | Section 3.3 |
| $f_C$ | controller update (Learning to Think) | Section 1.3 |
| $f_\mathrm{L}$, $f_\mathrm{H}$ | low-level and high-level module (HRM) | Section 4 |
| $K$ | residual branch | Sections 3.2, 3.4 |
| $P$, $R$ | prelude and tied core block (looped Transformer) | Section 3.6 |
| $C$ | coda (looped Transformer) | Section 3.6 |
| $C$, $M$ | controller and world model (Learning to Think) | Section 1.3 |
| Weights | ||
| $w$ | all weights of a network; shared weights if no index | throughout |
| $w_l$ | weights of layer $l$ | Sections 0, 3 |
| $w_C$, $w_M$ | weights of controller and world model | Section 1.3 |
| $w_\mathrm{L}$, $w_\mathrm{H}$ | weights of low-level and high-level module (HRM) | Section 4 |
| Operators | ||
| $\circ$ | function composition | Sections 0.1, 3 |
| $\odot$ | elementwise product | Section 1.1 |
| $\equiv$ | constant over all steps, e.g. $x^t \equiv x$ | Section 3.2 |
| ×∞, ×4, ×2 | loop until the fixed point, four passes, two passes | Figures 7, 8, 16 |
Abbreviations
- ACT: adaptive computation time
- ALBERT: A Lite BERT (BERT: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers)
- ARC-AGI: Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence
- DEQ: deep equilibrium model
- GAT: graph attention network
- GCN: graph convolutional network
- GLA: gated linear attention
- GNN: graph neural network
- GPT: generative pre-trained Transformer
- HRM: Hierarchical Reasoning Model
- LLM: large language model
- LSTM: long short-term memory
- mLSTM: matrix LSTM, the matrix-memory variant of the xLSTM
- RNN: recurrent neural network
- SE-RRM: symbol-equivariant recurrent reasoning model
- TRM: Tiny Recursive Model
- UT: Universal Transformer
- xLSTM: extended long short-term memory