Nested Shared-Operator Recursion on ARC-AGI-1: An Empirical Study of HRM, TRM and URM

Abstract: Recursive reasoning models refine persistent internal states by repeatedly applying learned operators. We investigate whether adding a persistent intermediate state that integrates repeated updates of a faster state through the same operator improves predictive performance relative to each model family's baseline at matched parameter counts. We define this organisation operationally and implement it within three architectures: the Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM), Tiny Recursive Model (TRM) and Universal Reasoning Model (URM). Using the official codebases on ARC-AGI-1, we compare each baseline with its parameter-matched nested variant. We evaluate held-out queries from tasks whose demonstrations were available during training. The experiments use a single-GPU budget far below the published training protocols. Under the tested conditions, nested variants show no consistent advantage in token accuracy, predictive loss or exact solving, which remains near zero for all configurations. The results therefore leave the hypothesis open. We specify a confirmatory comparison, with an informative baseline, multiple seeds, controls that isolate nesting and predefined criteria, to determine whether this organisation merits further development.