recursive

Definition

Applying the same operation to its own output, so the structure nests. It shows up in parsing nested syntax, in summarizing long documents by summarizing the summaries, and in agents that decompose a plan into subplans of the same form. Do not conflate it with recurrent: recurrent means carrying a hidden state forward through time steps, while recursive is about self-similar nesting of structure.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Deep-Dive: Recursive Synthesis — Extending Verified Tasks Into 40,000 Long-Horizon Terminal ProblemsRecursive Synthesis for Long-Horizon Terminal Tasks
• Paper Deep-Dive: Frontis-MA1 — Training the AI That Builds AI: One Step Toward Recursive Self-Improvement in ML EngineeringFrontis-MA1: Training an AI4AI Model towards Recursive Self-Improvement in Machine Learning Engineering
• Paper Deep-Dive: AgentOPSD — Finding the Turn That Won the Game with Recursive Bayesian Belief UpdatesAgentOPSD: Recursive Self-Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning