Modern language models reason within bounded context, an inherent constraint that poses a fundamental barrier to long-horizon reasoning. We identify recursion as a core principle for overcoming this barrier, and propose recursive models as a minimal realization, where the model can recursively invoke itself to solve subtasks in isolated contexts. We prove that any computable problem admits a recursive decomposition of reasoning in which each subtask requires only exponentially smaller active context than standard autoregressive models; this strictly surpasses any context management approach confined to a single sequence, such as summarization. We further generalize our framework to modern agentic systems with arbitrary context processing and control flows, and prove that recursive models can achieve optimal power within this broader class. Experimentally, we test two settings: fine-tuning a pretrained base model for recursive SAT solving, and training a small model from scratch on Go traces generated by exact game-tree search. Both show improved long-horizon accuracy with small active contexts.
Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Darmstadt（德累斯顿技术大学计算机科学系）；Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校计算机科学系）；Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence (hessian.ai)（黑森人工智能中心）；German Research Center for AI (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）
MedRLM: Recursive Multimodal Health Intelligence for Long-Context Clinical Reasoning, Sensor-Guided Screening, Evidence-Grounded Decision Support, and Community-to-Tertiary Referral Optimization
School of Information, Computer；Communication Technology Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology, Thammasat University Pathum Thani, Thailand 1
Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学基础与前沿研究院）；School of Physics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学物理学院）；Key Laboratory of Quantum Physics and Photonic Quantum Information, Ministry of Education, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学量子物理与光子量子信息教育部重点实验室）；Non-classical Information Science Basic Discipline Research Center of Sichuan Province, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（四川省非经典信息科学基础学科研究中心）
Towards Long-Horizon Interpretability: Efficient and Faithful Multi-Token Attribution for Reasoning LLMs
Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China（香港城市大学计算机科学系）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China（哈尔滨工业大学）
Why Reasoning Fails to Plan: A Planning-Centric Analysis of Long-Horizon Decision Making in LLM Agents
University of Notre Dame（诺丁汉大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）
Recursive Synthesis for Long-Horizon Terminal Tasks
Tencent HY LLM Frontier（腾讯HY大模型前沿团队）；University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；University of Minnesota, Twin Cities（明尼苏达大学双城分校）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
WorkRover: Scaling Long-Horizon Cowork Agent Training Via Recursive Environment Evolution
Fudan University（复旦大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Shanghai Qiji Zhifeng Co., Ltd.（上海齐骥智峰有限公司）；Shanghai Innovation Institute（上海创新研究院）
Dynamical Systems Theory Behind a Hierarchical Reasoning Model
Department of Radiophysics, University of Nizhny Novgorod（尼日尼诺夫戈罗德大学无线电物理系）；Huawei Nizhny Novgorod Research Center（华为尼日尼诺夫戈罗德研究中心）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯克洛科夫科学与技术研究院）
Diffusion-Based Rollouts as a Stabilization Mechanism for Long-Horizon Environmental Forecasting
University of California Irvine（加州大学尔湾分校）；San Diego State University（圣地亚哥州立大学）；University of Oklahoma（俄克拉荷马大学）；NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography（NSF可信AI天气、气候与海岸海洋研究所）
The $\mathbf{Y}$-Combinator for LLMs: Solving Long-Context Rot with $λ$-Calculus
The School of Interdisciplinary Research（跨学科研究学院）；Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi（印度理工学院德里分校）；Robert Bosch GmbH, India（德国罗伯特·博世有限公司，印度）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；Huawei Noah’s Ark UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence（华为诺亚方舟大学伦敦人工智能中心）
