arXiv Machine Learning

What Makes a Representational Prior Work? Feature Families, Label-Free Invariances, and Critical Windows in Grokking

arXiv:2607. 12735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Companion work showed the grokking delay is causally the time to form task-structured representations, injectable via a contrastive prior.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 7

PoolBench: A Benchmark for Pooling Strategies in Concept Representation Evaluation for Decoder-Only LLMs

arXiv:2608. 05162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pooling is a consequential but under-examined design choice in decoder-only concept representation work: practitioners must collapse token-level hidden states into a passage-level vector, yet no shared protocol exists for comparing this choice across concepts, models, and tasks.

By Ayushi Agarwal
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Pattern Selectivity is Not Task-Causal Structure: A Cross-Architecture Mechanistic Study of Composed-Task Circuits in 1B-Class Language Models

arXiv:2606. 05378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We test whether a single screen-and-ablate recipe -- identify attention-head circuits by task-pattern selectivity, then verify by causal ablation against a matched-random null -- produces consistent mechanistic claims across model families.

By Yongzhong Xu
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Remembering Distinct Items, Not Tokens: A Learnable Dirichlet-Process Cache Between State-Space Models and Attention

arXiv:2607. 09889v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fixed-state sequence models compress an unbounded past into a bounded state, which caps their associative recall at roughly the state dimension; attention escapes the cap by keeping a key-value entry for every token, at quadratic compute and a cache that grows with the sequence.

By Siddharth Pal, Viktoria Rojkova
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Brevity is the Soul of Inference Efficiency: Inducing Concision in VLMs via Data Curation

arXiv:2606. 25432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inference efficiency is typically pursued by shrinking the model: distillation, pruning, quantization, and sparse routing each lower per-token cost while treating token count as fixed.

By DatologyAI, :, Matthew L. Leavitt, Siddharth Joshi, Haoli Yin, Rishabh Adiga, Haakon Mongstad, Alvin Deng, David Schwab, Bogdan Gaza, Ari Morcos
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 11

Circuit Synchronization Precedes Generalization: Causal Evidence from Fourier Structure in Grokking Transformers

Grokking -- where a transformer on modular arithmetic suddenly transitions from near-chance to near-perfect validation accuracy -- is attributed to a Fourier circuit, but its timing, causal structure, and controllability remain poorly understood. We introduce the Frequency Synchronization Degree (FSD), a normalised, permutation-tested metric for Fourier circuit synchronisation requiring no prior circuit knowledge.