We've seen LLMs struggle with complex, multi-step reasoning tasks. The common approach, Chain-of-Thought (CoT), often requires massive datasets, is brittle, and suffers from high latency.
To tackle this, we developed the Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM), a novel recurrent architecture inspired by how the human brain processes information across different timescales (as seen in the diagram on the left).
It's a small model that packs a huge punch. Here are the key highlights:
Extremely Lightweight: Only 27 million parameters.
Data Efficient: Trained with just 1000 samples for the complex tasks shown.
No Pre-training Needed: It works from scratch without needing massive pre-training or any CoT supervision data.
Single Forward Pass: It solves the entire reasoning task in one go, making it incredibly fast and efficient.
How It Works
HRM consists of two interconnected recurrent modules that mimic brain-wave coupling:
High-level Module: Operates slowly, like the brain's Theta waves (θ, 4-8Hz), to handle abstract planning and goal setting.
Low-level Module: Operates quickly, like Gamma waves (γ, ~40Hz), to execute the fine-grained computational steps.
These two modules work together, allowing the model to achieve significant computational depth while remaining stable and efficient to train.
Astonishing Performance
The results speak for themselves (see charts on the right). On tasks requiring complex, precise reasoning, HRM dramatically outperforms much larger models:
Extreme Sudoku (9x9): HRM achieves 55.0% accuracy. Other models, including direct prediction and larger LLMs like Claude 3.7 8K, score 0.0%.
Hard Maze (30x30): HRM finds the optimal path 74.5% of the time. Again, others score 0.0%.
ARC-AGI Benchmark: On the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), a key test for AGI capabilities, HRM significantly outperforms larger models with much longer context windows.
We believe HRM represents a transformative step towards more general and efficient reasoning systems. It shows that a carefully designed architecture can sometimes beat brute-force scale.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on this approach! What other applications could you see for a model like this?
mingli_yuan•7h ago
We've seen LLMs struggle with complex, multi-step reasoning tasks. The common approach, Chain-of-Thought (CoT), often requires massive datasets, is brittle, and suffers from high latency.
To tackle this, we developed the Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM), a novel recurrent architecture inspired by how the human brain processes information across different timescales (as seen in the diagram on the left).
It's a small model that packs a huge punch. Here are the key highlights:
Extremely Lightweight: Only 27 million parameters.
Data Efficient: Trained with just 1000 samples for the complex tasks shown.
No Pre-training Needed: It works from scratch without needing massive pre-training or any CoT supervision data.
Single Forward Pass: It solves the entire reasoning task in one go, making it incredibly fast and efficient.
How It Works HRM consists of two interconnected recurrent modules that mimic brain-wave coupling:
High-level Module: Operates slowly, like the brain's Theta waves (θ, 4-8Hz), to handle abstract planning and goal setting.
Low-level Module: Operates quickly, like Gamma waves (γ, ~40Hz), to execute the fine-grained computational steps.
These two modules work together, allowing the model to achieve significant computational depth while remaining stable and efficient to train.
Astonishing Performance The results speak for themselves (see charts on the right). On tasks requiring complex, precise reasoning, HRM dramatically outperforms much larger models:
Extreme Sudoku (9x9): HRM achieves 55.0% accuracy. Other models, including direct prediction and larger LLMs like Claude 3.7 8K, score 0.0%.
Hard Maze (30x30): HRM finds the optimal path 74.5% of the time. Again, others score 0.0%.
ARC-AGI Benchmark: On the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), a key test for AGI capabilities, HRM significantly outperforms larger models with much longer context windows.
We believe HRM represents a transformative step towards more general and efficient reasoning systems. It shows that a carefully designed architecture can sometimes beat brute-force scale.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on this approach! What other applications could you see for a model like this?
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21734 Code: https://github.com/sapientinc/HRM