1All 78 references of this paper were resolved through the arXiv Atom API or the publisher page at execution time2(2026-10-29/30); mechanisms of the closest neighbours were read from their full texts, and code availability and3licences from the official repositories (\texttt{literature/papers.bib}, \texttt{comparison\_matrix.csv},4\texttt{novelty\_audit.md}). Table~\ref{tab:novelty} summarises the claim-by-claim audit.56\begin{table}[h]\centering\small7\caption{Claim-by-claim novelty audit (2026-10-29).}\label{tab:novelty}8\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{p{3.1cm}p{3.4cm}XX}\toprule9Proposed claim & Closest sources & Actual distinction & Status\\\midrule10C1 selected local writes into a per-token slot workspace & RIMs, Shared Global Workspace, Perceiver AR, Slot Attention, SAM, ReFlux & no prior work combines a non-persistent per-token slot bank, a separate read-only cached source bank, and discrete 1--2-slot write actions & partially novel\\11C2 action-conditional counterfactual gain supervision with logged propensities & Ouro stage II, TaH2 ``lookahead depth supervision'', RecurTrace oracle halting; Dud\'ik et al., Swaminathan \& Joachims & binary continue/stop versions exist; conditioning the label on which of 24 spatial actions is taken, with propensities and separate gain/cost/risk/harm heads, has no predecessor & partially novel\\12C3 differential readout with exact zero-budget bypass & ReZero, Flamingo, ControlNet, Mixture-of-Depths, TaH/TaH2, ReFlux, ELR & a modest variant of zero-initialised identity insertion & not novel\\13C4 the combination C1+C2+C3 & ReFlux, TaH2, RecurTrace, MoR & no work has all three; the contribution must be empirical & partially novel\\14C5 catalogue of 16 singles + 8 fixed pairs + \Stop & top-$k$ expert/mechanism routing, DQN discrete action sets & a design choice; reported with sensitivity analysis & not novel\\15\bottomrule\end{tabularx}16\end{table}1718Near neighbours published after June 2025 and re-checked at execution time include Ouro, Mixture-of-Recursions,19PonderLM, Inner Thinking Transformer, Encode--Think--Decode, Parallel Loop Transformer, Think-at-Hard and TaH2,20LoopFormer, AdaPonderLM, latent lookahead, LoopUS, the Latent Recurrent Transformer, LaTER, Depth-Attention,21DiscoLoop, Logan, RecurTrace, ReFlux and Elastic Latent Recurrence (all in \texttt{papers.bib}); the arXiv22listing should be re-checked the week before any submission.23