# Reasoning with Latent Thoughts: On the Power of Looped Transformers

Authors: Nikunj Saunshi, Nishanth Dikkala, Zhiyuan Li, Sanjiv Kumar, Sashank J. Reddi.

Analyzes the expressive power of transformers that repeatedly apply shared layers, treating recurrent depth as a form of internal reasoning.

First public: 2025-02-24.
ArXiv initial submission: 2025-02-24.

[Original paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17416) · [Reading-list entry](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2502.17416/)
[Preprint BibTeX](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2502.17416/citation.bib) · [Preprint CSL-JSON](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2502.17416/citation.csl.json) · [JSON record](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2502.17416/record.json)

## Approaches

- [Recurrent reasoning](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/topics/recurrent-reasoning/): Repeat parts of the model or keep intermediate information in memory while working through a problem. Some methods also learn how many passes to run.

Summary and categories are editorial. Read the original paper to verify claims and limitations. A citation to a paper does not, by itself, establish that a later method builds on it.

Reading-list version 0.9.5; literature checked through 2026-10-18.