Less is More: How Tiny Networks Outperform Giant LLMs on Hard Puzzles
Last Updated on October 28, 2025 by Editorial Team
Author(s): Gowtham Boyina
Originally published on Towards AI.
A deep dive into Tiny Recursive Models (TRM) — achieving 45% accuracy on ARC-AGI-1 with 7M parameters, outperforming models 10,000x larger
Large Language Models have revolutionized AI, but they struggle on certain types of hard reasoning tasks. Consider ARC-AGI — a benchmark of geometric puzzles designed to be easy for humans but challenging for AI. Despite years of progress, even state-of-the-art LLMs with massive parameter counts struggle to make significant headway, particularly on the newer ARC-AGI-2 benchmark.
The article explores the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) in solving complex reasoning tasks and introduces Tiny Recursive Models (TRM), a new architecture that performs better with significantly fewer parameters. Developed by Samsung SAIL, TRM achieves remarkable accuracy on the ARC-AGI benchmarks through deep supervision and a unique iterative refinement process. The approach challenges the common belief that larger models are necessarily better, demonstrating that effective architectural design can yield superior results even with minimal parameters. By training models to self-correct, TRM provides insights for addressing specific problem classes more efficiently.
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