Paper · arXiv 2512.14693
Universal Reasoning Model
Zitian Gao, Lynx Chen, Yihao Xiao, He Xing, Ran Tao, Haoming Luo, Joey Zhou, Bryan Dai
The Universal Reasoning Model enhances Universal Transformers with short convolution and truncated backpropagation to improve reasoning performance on ARC-AGI tasks.
Abstract
Universal transformers (UTs) have been widely used for complex reasoning tasks such as ARC-AGI and Sudoku, yet the specific sources of their performance gains remain underexplored. In this work, we systematically analyze UTs variants and show that improvements on ARC-AGI primarily arise from the recurrent inductive bias and strong nonlinear components of Transformer, rather than from elaborate architectural designs. Motivated by this finding, we propose the Universal Reasoning Model (URM), which enhances the UT with short convolution and truncated backpropagation. Our approach substantially improves reasoning performance, achieving state-of-the-art 53.8% pass@1 on ARC-AGI 1 and 16.0% pass@1 on ARC-AGI 2. Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/zitian-gao/URM.