Looped Reasoning Finishes Earlier Than You Think

Abstract

Looped reasoning with dynamic depth can be viewed as relaxation toward solution attractors in a learned dynamical landscape. In practice, however, latent trajectories often oscillate, cycle, or drift rather than cleanly converge to stable fixed points. How these non-stationary dynamics contribute to reasoning and constrain convergence remains unclear. We show that slowly decaying oscillatory modes can impose their convergence rate on coupled latent dynamics, creating a bottleneck. Yet damping these modes indiscriminately can disrupt the reasoning computation they support. This tension motivates an architectural approach: introducing rotational degrees of freedom along which symmetry-generated rotational motion leaves the reasoning-relevant quotient dynamics unchanged by construction. We propose QRR (Quotient Recurrent Reasoner), a gauge-equivariant recurrent architecture with an exact per-token phase-rotation symmetry. Motion along these symmetry directions leaves the quotient representation unchanged and is dynamically decoupled from reasoning-relevant dynamics. Empirically, QRR achieves stable and faster convergence to solution roots in quotient space, without forming a dominant slow oscillatory bottleneck, while matching or surpassing recent recurrent reasoning models on Sudoku, Maze, and Mini-ARC.