Recursive neural networks (RNNs) were developed to model recursive structures like images, sentences, and phrases. RNNs construct feature representations recursively from components. Later models like recursive autoencoders (RAEs), matrix-vector RNNs (MV-RNNs), and recursive neural tensor networks (RNTNs) improved on RNNs by handling unlabeled data, incorporating different composition rules, and reducing parameters. These recursive models achieved strong performance on tasks like image segmentation, sentiment analysis, and paraphrase detection.