Recursive reasoning models address structured problems by repeatedly updating latent states of small neural networks. However, their test-time scaling lacks a principled inference mechanism: increasing depth or stochastic breadth generates more trajectories without a clear criterion for selection, and existing methods predominantly rely on additional q-heads or heuristic voting. Here, we develop the Energy-guided Recursive Model (ERM), which introduces an intrinsic selection principle based on explicit Hopfield energies. ERM leverages Hopfield-type memories of valid local or global structures to define the selector over candidate trajectories. The resulting energy seamlessly integrates with energy-based techniques such as parallel tempering to enhance sampling efficiency and ranking. With $D=64$ recurrent steps and $K=128$ candidates, ERM reaches optimal solutions on Sudoku ($98.97\%$), Pencil Puzzle Bench (PPBench, $88.04\%$) and Maze ($99.30\%$), improving upon recent Probabilistic Tiny Recursive Model and Equilibrium Reasoners. These results suggest that incorporating explicit energy functions into recursive reasoning offers a principled path toward more effective inference.
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed, reliable and efficient mechanisms for distinguishing AI-generated text from human-written content have become essential. Statistical watermarking has emerged as a promising solution, yet most existing methods are typicall…
We study the expected improvement (EI) policy for minimizing a deterministic objective function $f$ on a nonempty compact set $\mathcal X \subset\mathbb R^d$. We assume that $f$ belongs to the RKHS $\mathcal H_k$ of a continuous positive-semidefinite kernel $k$ on $\mathcal X$. F…
Organizations increasingly rely on sequential experimentation to improve decision-making. While the multi-armed bandit literature has developed algorithms with strong asymptotic regret guarantees, many practical applications operate over finite and externally imposed horizons. Mo…
Double Machine Learning (DML) is a popular approach for treatment effect estimation in various settings, which allows a wide range of flexible machine learning methods to be used for nuisance parameter estimation while preserving valid inference. In practice, however, applied res…
Density modes provide a localized and interpretable summary of multimodal distributions, but their estimation under rigorous differential privacy constraints remains largely unexplored. We study differentially private recovery of density modes for multivariate distributions under…
A defining problem of the Anthropocene is to model the physical Earth and human societies as one coupled system, yet no learned representation spans their observational breadth. We argue the obstacle is geometric: the physical Earth is measured as continuous fields that ignore po…