# PonderLM-3: Adaptive Token-Wise Pondering with Differentiable Masking

Authors: He Li, Feichen Song, Boyi Zeng, Shixiang Song, Zhiqin John Xu, Ziwei He, Zhouhan Lin.

Uses differentiable masks to allocate a variable number of recurrent pondering steps to different token positions.

First public: 2026-03-02.
ArXiv initial submission: 2026-03-02.

[Original paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02023) · [Reading-list entry](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2603.02023/)
[Preprint BibTeX](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2603.02023/citation.bib) · [Preprint CSL-JSON](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2603.02023/citation.csl.json) · [JSON record](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2603.02023/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.