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Hierarchical Reasoning Model (arxiv.org)
2 points by mountainview on Jul 4, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A slow planner module and a fast detail module loop together inside one pass, so the system reasons without writing out step-by-step thoughts. Trained on just 1,000 examples, it nearly solves hard Sudoku and big mazes and beats much larger models on abstract puzzles.

Abstract

Reasoning, the process of devising and executing complex goal-oriented action sequences, remains a critical challenge in AI. Current large language models (LLMs) primarily employ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques, which suffer from brittle task decomposition, extensive data requirements, and high latency. Inspired by the hierarchical and multi-timescale processing in the human brain, we propose the Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM), a novel recurrent architecture that attains significant computational depth while maintaining both training stability and efficiency. HRM executes sequential reasoning tasks in a single forward pass without explicit supervision of the intermediate process, through two interdependent recurrent modules: a high-level module responsible for slow, abstract planning, and a low-level module handling rapid, detailed computations. With only 27 million parameters, HRM achieves exceptional performance on complex reasoning tasks using only 1000 training samples. The model operates without pre-training or CoT data, yet achieves nearly perfect performance on challenging tasks including complex Sudoku puzzles and optimal path finding in large mazes. Furthermore, HRM outperforms much larger models with significantly longer context windows on the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), a key benchmark for measuring artificial general intelligence capabilities. These results underscore HRM's potential as a transformative advancement toward universal computation and general-purpose reasoning systems.

Guan Wang, Jin Li, Yuhao Sun, Xing Chen, Changling Liu, Yue Wu, Meng Lu, Sen Song, Yasin Abbasi Yadkori
arXiv:2506.21734 · cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Jun 26, 2025 · updated Sep 30, 2026
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