For hard long-context tasks, the paper suggests a simple fix: run the model again with its previous reasoning first, an approach that won 26 of 27 comparisons.
Because, Long-context models often figure out what matters too late
Because it processes the prompt in order, that late insight cannot go back and change how the earlier context was read.
TRACE AS STATE gives it another pass, with its own earlier reasoning placed first, so it knows what to look for while rereading.
– arxiv. org/abs/2609.02702
Title: "Trace as State: Reasoning Traces as Conditional States for Long-Context Transformers"