# Think Shallow, Solve Deep: Controlling Recurrent Dynamics for Reliable Test-Time Depth

Authors: Ivan Viakhirev, Kirill Borodin, Amirah Almutairi, Serguei Barannikov, Maxim Abramov, Grach Mkrtchian.

Studies when extra transformer loops improve an answer or make it worse. Gives a condition under which further loops cannot change the answer, and trains models toward this stable behavior.

First public: 2026-08-18.
ArXiv initial submission: 2026-08-18.

[Original paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18222) · [Reading-list entry](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2608.18222/)
[Preprint BibTeX](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2608.18222/citation.bib) · [Preprint CSL-JSON](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2608.18222/citation.csl.json) · [JSON record](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2608.18222/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.
- [Analysis and evaluation](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/topics/implicit-reasoning-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.

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.