ReSSFormer: A Recursive Sparse Structured Transformer for Scalable and Long-Context Reasoning
On the map: LLM reasoning → Test-time compute and efficient thinking
Abstract (arXiv)
While Transformer architectures have demonstrated impressive scalability across domains, they continue to face challenges in long-context reasoning, computational efficiency, and structural generalization - largely due to rigid layer stacking, dense attention, and reliance on positional encodings. We present ReSSFormer, a Recursive Sparse Structured Transformer that integrates three complementary innovations: Recurrent Reasoning & Memory Unit (R2MU) for iterative reasoning with bounded depth, Adaptive Sparse Attention Module (ASAM) for efficient and focused context selection, and Self-Organizing Encoder Structure (SOES) for position-free structure induction. ReSSFormer replaces conventional depth stacking with recurrent inference, substitutes full attention with token- and expert-level sparsity, and models latent token topology directly from content. Across language modeling, multi-hop QA, and structure-sensitive tasks, ReSSFormer consistently outperforms strong baselines under comparable FLOPs and parameter budgets, highlighting its scalability, efficiency, and structural flexibility.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 32 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2025.
Builds on
32 of 37 references.
References · 32
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20 more
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- 2026T^2MLR: Transformer with Temporal Middle-Layer Recurrence
- 2026Penelope: Localized Latent Recurrence for Efficient Structured Reasoning
- 2026CausalGate: Causal Importance Distillation for Transformer Module Pruning
- 2026LoopFormer: Elastic-Depth Looped Transformers for Latent Reasoning via Shortcut Modulation
- 2025TreeGPT: Pure TreeFFN Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Structured Reasoning Without Attention Mechanisms
- 2026Think Deep, Speak Once: Relit, A Recursive Latent Implicit Transformer Framework
- 2026Beyond Dense States: Sparse Transcoders as Causally Testable Operators for LLM Latent Reasoning
- 2025Hydra: A Modular Architecture for Efficient Long-Context Reasoning