IAAITo CoT or To Loop?
To CoT or To Loop? A Formal Comparison Between Chain-of-Thought and Looped Transformers
A formal comparison of chain-of-thought and looped transformers: looped models efficiently simulate parallel deterministic computation over DAGs, while stochastic CoT excels at approximate inference for self-reducible compositional problems.
Inside the method
Looped: depth over a DAG vs CoT: sequential stochastic tokens
Simplified conceptual schematic. Consult the paper for the complete architecture.
- Recurrence family
- Full-stack recurrence
- Depth control
- Theory
- KV / state strategy
- See paper
Reading note
Provides separations that suggest when depth-driven recursion is preferable to token-level reasoning. Theory paper.
Sources checked 2026-10-28. This catalog does not imply independent reproduction.
Related works
Cite this work
@misc{cotorloop2025,
title = {To CoT or To Loop? A Formal Comparison Between Chain-of-Thought and Looped Transformers},
author = {Kevin Xu and Issei Sato},
year = {2025},
eprint = {2505.19245},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19245}
}