Samsung researchers create tiny AI model that shames the biggest LLMs in reasoning puzzles – News

Researchers from Samsung Electronic Co. Ltd. have created a tiny artificial intelligence model that punches far above its weight on certain kinds of “reasoning” tasks, challenging the industry’s longheld logic that “bigger means better.”

Released this week, the Tiny Recursive Model or TRM has just 7 million parameters, far fewer than most other AI models. Yet it shows that it can outperform powerful large language models such as Google LLC’s Gemini 2.5 Pro on tough reasoning puzzles such as “Sudoku.”

Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau, a senior researcher at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology AI Lab in Montreal, published a paper on arXiv that demonstrates how clever design can be more effective than simply increasing the number of parameters in AI models. It uses a special “recursive reasoning” process that enables it to think in “loops,” going over the same problem repeatedly in order to improve its answers.

The paper, titled “Less is More: Recursive Reasoning with Tiny Networks,” reveals how TRM was designed specifically to tackle logic puzzles and reasoning challenges. It’s not able to chat with humans, write stories or create images like other models can. But its narrow focus means it can solve some really hard problems with greater accuracy than its much larger counterparts.

For instance, TRM achieved 87% accuracy on Sudoku-Extreme, a benchmark that challenges AI models to complete multiple “Sudoku” puzzles. It also racked up an 85% score on Maze-Hard, which tasks models with finding their way through complex mazes in the fastest time possible. And it scored 45% and 8% on the ARC-AGI-1 and ARC-AGI-2 benchmarks, which consist of more abstract reasoning puzzles designed to test for “general intelligence.”

In each of these tasks, TRM outperformed much larger models. For instance, Gemini 2.5 Pro could only score 4.9% on the ARC-AGI-2 test, while OpenAI’s o3-mini-high scored just 3%, DeepSeek Ltd.’s R1 achieved just 1.3% and Anthropic PBC’s Claude 3.7 could only muster a 0.7% score. TRM achieved this with less than 0.01% of the parameters used by the most powerful large language models.

New paper 📜: Tiny Recursion Model (TRM) is a recursive reasoning approach with a tiny 7M parameters neural network that obtains 45% on ARC-AGI-1 and 8% on ARC-AGI-2, beating most LLMs.

Blog: https://t.co/w5ZDsHDDPE

Code: https://t.co/7UgKuD9Yll

Paper: https://t.co/3m8ANhNMiw

— Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau (@jm_alexia) October 7, 2025

Recursive reasoning loops

Rather than build a large neural network, Samsung’s researchers looked at the possibility of using recursion, which is a technique humans can also use. Essentially, the model looks at its answer and asks itself, “Is it any good? If not, can I come up with a better answer?” It then attempts to solve the puzzle again, refining its answer, and repeats this process until it’s satisfied.

To do this, TRM maintains two short-term memories – it remembers the current solution, and also creates a kind of scratchpad to jot down the intermediate steps it takes to try and improve on that. At each step, the model updates the scratchpad by reviewing the task, the current solutions and its previous notes, before generating an improved output based on that information.

It repeats this loop multiple times, gradually refining its answers, eliminating the need for lengthy reasoning chains that can only be handled by billions of parameters. Instead, only a small network of a few million parameters is required.

The researchers stated in the paper that TRM is programmed to “recursively refine latent and output states without assuming convergence.” What this means is that the model is not forced to settle on an answer too soon, but rather, allowed to keep repeating the loop until it’s unable to improve its output any more.

It uses an “adaptive halting” technique that allows it to figure out for itself when that happens, preventing it from running indefinitely. The model also employs deep supervision, which means it can obtain feedback at multiple steps of its reasoning process, instead of just at the end. This helps the model to learn more effectively, the authors said.

Less is more could be a big deal

Jolicoeur-Martineau said in a blog post that the research is significant because it demonstrates that small, highly targeted models can achieve excellent results on narrow, structured reasoning tasks, and it could be a significant development for the broader AI industry.

The obvious benefit is that it makes powerful AI systems more accessible. The biggest LLMs with billions or even trillions of parameters can only be run on enormous clusters of specialized and expensive graphics processing units. These consume vast amounts of energy, which means that only a handful of rich companies and well-funded universities can experiment with them. But a model like TRM, which only has a few million parameters, can be run on commodity hardware, with a much lower energy footprint.

< 500$, 4 H-100 for around 2days

— Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau (@jm_alexia) October 7, 2025

It potentially opens the door for many more universities, startups and independent developers to experiment with advanced AI models and accelerate innovation.

That said, Jolicoeur-Martineau’s team pointed out that their findings don’t mean LLMs are obsolete. TRM can only operate effectively when handling well-defined grid problems, and is not suitable for open-ended, text-based or multimodal tasks. Nonetheless, it represents a promising development, and the researchers plan to conduct further experiments to try and adapt recursive learning models to new domains.

Image: News/Dreamina AI