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Equilibrium Reasoners: Learning Attractors Enables Scalable Reasoning

Machine Learning 2026-05-21 v1

Abstract

Scaling test-time compute by iteratively updating a latent state has emerged as a powerful paradigm for reasoning. Yet the internal mechanisms that enable these iterative models to generalize beyond memorized patterns remain unclear. We hypothesize that generalizable reasoning arises from learning task-conditioned attractors: latent dynamical systems whose stable fixed points correspond to valid solutions. We formalize this process through Equilibrium Reasoners (EqR), which enable test-time scaling without external verifiers or task-specific priors. EqR scales internal dynamics along two axes: depth, by running more iterations, and breadth, by aggregating stochastic trajectories from multiple initializations. Empirically, gains from test-time scaling are tightly coupled with stronger convergence toward solution-aligned attractors. This attractor perspective allows neural networks to adaptively allocate test-time compute based on task difficulty. While simple cases converge within 1 to 5 iteration steps, harder cases benefit from massive test-time scaling. By unrolling up to the equivalent of 40,000 layers, scalable latent reasoning boosts accuracy from 2.6% for feedforward models to over 99% on Sudoku-Extreme. These results suggest that learned attractor landscapes provide a useful mechanistic lens for understanding scalable reasoning in iterative latent models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.21488,
  title  = {Equilibrium Reasoners: Learning Attractors Enables Scalable Reasoning},
  author = {Benhao Huang and Zhengyang Geng and Zico Kolter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.21488},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

ICML 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:24:33.406Z