DadgogoAI Dictionary

Dictionary entry

opaque recurrence

noun \ō-ˈpāk ri-ˈkər-ən(t)s\

also recurrent depth or latent reasoning

TopicSafety & Ethics First known use2025 Senses1
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Definition of opaque recurrence

  1. : a technique in which a model reasons by looping information through its internal layers several times instead of writing out its reasoning in words; efficient, but harder for humans to monitor

    • Opaque recurrence saves tokens, but there's no chain of thought to read.
    • Engineers call it recurrent depth; safety researchers call it opaque recurrence.

Origin & history

first known use2025

Research on 'recurrent depth' models appeared in 2025; 'opaque recurrence' is the name used when stressing the oversight problem.

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Related terms

neuralese the internal numerical 'language' a model might use to think and communicate, which humans… chain of thought a series of intermediate reasoning steps a model writes out before its final answer, either… test-time compute extra computing power spent while answering a question, for example by letting the model think… interpretability research into understanding what is happening inside a model, such as which internal features…

Cite this entry

"Opaque recurrence." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/opaque-recurrence/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.

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