Flow Reasoning Models: Turning Flows Into Efficient Recurrent Reasoners

Structured reasoning requires making and revising interdependent decisions to reach a globally consistent solution. Existing architectures struggle with this: autoregressive models commit sequentially and cannot revise earlier decisions, while masked diffusion models often require careful decoding schemes to coordinate interdependent predictions. We introduce Flow Reasoning Models (FRMs), a novel framework for structured reasoning that adapts continuous flows over discrete structured outputs with a simple recurrent refinement mechanism. By self-conditioning a flow model on its own past outputs, we turn one-shot denoising into iterative solution refinement. This lets FRMs make and revise decisions in parallel, efficiently coordinating interdependent choices across solutions. Yet conventional self-conditioning becomes unreliable at greater recurrent depth due to exposure bias between one-step training predictions and recursively generated inference states. We address this mismatch with Fixed-Point Forcing (FPF), which trains FRMs on states produced by their own inference dynamics while preserving the standard flow-matching objective. FRMs achieve solve rates of 99.5%, 100.0%, and 99.9% on Sudoku-Extreme, Zebra, and Maze-Unique, respectively. On Sudoku-Extreme, FRMs achieve higher peak accuracy than the evaluated masked-diffusion and specialized reasoning baselines while remaining highly compute-efficient, matching the next-best method's 98.7% peak solve rate with 44 times fewer inference FLOPs.