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To CoT or To Loop? A Formal Comparison Between Chain-of-Thought and Looped Transformers

Kevin Xu, Issei Sato

Formally compares explicit chain-of-thought computation with repeated internal transformations in looped transformer architectures.

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arXiv:2505.19245 · Initial submission: 2025-05-25

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Analysis and evaluation — Measure how well these methods work, investigate what their internal computation does, and identify where they fail. This includes experiments, studies of model internals, and mathematical results.

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.

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