LEAD: Breaking the No-Recovery Bottleneck in Long-Horizon Reasoning

Long-horizon execution in Large Language Models (LLMs) remains unstable even when high-level strategies are provided. Evaluating on controlled algorithmic puzzles, we demonstrate that while decomposition is essential for stability, extreme decomposition creates a “no-recovery bottleneck”. We show that this bottleneck becomes critical due to highly non-uniform error distribution, where consistent errors on a few “hard” steps become irreversible. To address this, we propose Lookahead-Enhanced Atomic Decomposition (LEAD). By incorporating short-horizon future validation and aggregating overlapping rollouts, LEAD provides enough isolation to maintain stability while retaining enough local context to correct errors. This enables the o4-mini model to solve Checkers Jumping up to complexity n = 13, whereas extreme decomposition fails beyond n = 11.

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