14.6AIMay 19
Generative Recursive ReasoningJunyeob Baek, Mingyu Jo, Minsu Kim et al.
How should future neural reasoning systems implement extended computation? Recursive Reasoning Models (RRMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive sequence extension by performing iterative latent-state refinement with shared transition functions. Yet existing RRMs are largely deterministic, following a single latent trajectory and converging to a single prediction. We introduce \emph{Generative Recursive reAsoning Models (GRAM)}, a framework that turns recursive latent reasoning into probabilistic multi-trajectory computation. GRAM models reasoning as a stochastic latent trajectory, enabling multiple hypotheses, alternative solution strategies, and inference-time scaling through both recursive depth and parallel trajectory sampling. This yields a latent-variable generative model supporting conditional reasoning via $p_θ(y \mid x)$ and, with fixed or absent inputs, unconditional generation via $p_θ(x)$. Trained with amortized variational inference, GRAM improves over deterministic recurrent and recursive baselines on structured reasoning and multi-solution constraint satisfaction tasks, while demonstrating an unconditional generation capability. \href{https://ahn-ml.github.io/gram-website/}{https://ahn-ml.github.io/gram-website}
9.8LGMay 5
Learning to Theorize the World from ObservationDoojin Baek, Gyubin Lee, Junyeob Baek et al.
What does it mean to understand the world? Contemporary world models often operationalize understanding as accurate future prediction in latent or observation space. Developmental cognitive science, however, suggests a different view: human understanding emerges through the construction of internal theories of how the world works, even before mature language is acquired. Inspired by this theory-building view of cognition, we introduce Learning-to-Theorize, a learning paradigm for inferring explicit explanatory theories of the world from raw, non-textual observations. We instantiate this paradigm with the Neural Theorizer (NEO), a probabilistic neural model that induces latent programs as a learned Language of Thought and executes them through a shared transition model. In NEO, a theory is represented as an executable, compositional program whose learned primitives can be systematically recombined to explain novel phenomena. Experiments show that this formulation enables explanation-driven generalization, allowing observations to be understood in terms of the programs that generate them.
PlanDQ: Hierarchical Plan Orchestration via D-Conductor and Q-PerformerChang Chen, Junyeob Baek, Fei Deng et al.
Despite the recent advancements in offline RL, no unified algorithm could achieve superior performance across a broad range of tasks. Offline \textit{value function learning}, in particular, struggles with sparse-reward, long-horizon tasks due to the difficulty of solving credit assignment and extrapolation errors that accumulates as the horizon of the task grows.~On the other hand, models that can perform well in long-horizon tasks are designed specifically for goal-conditioned tasks, which commonly perform worse than value function learning methods on short-horizon, dense-reward scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose a hierarchical planner designed for offline RL called PlanDQ. PlanDQ incorporates a diffusion-based planner at the high level, named D-Conductor, which guides the low-level policy through sub-goals. At the low level, we used a Q-learning based approach called the Q-Performer to accomplish these sub-goals. Our experimental results suggest that PlanDQ can achieve superior or competitive performance on D4RL continuous control benchmark tasks as well as AntMaze, Kitchen, and Calvin as long-horizon tasks.