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How Depth Growth and Looping Shape In-Context Learning in Language Models

Ferdinand Kapl, Kaitlin Maile, Stefan Bauer, Johannes von Oswald

Compares dense, progressively grown and looped Transformers on in-context learning. Attention-head tracing and ablation link stronger context use in grown and looped models to greater reliance on induction heads.

First public: · Added to this list: November 2, 2026

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ArXiv preprint

arXiv:2610.31421 · Initial submission: 2026-10-22

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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 — 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.