The paper investigates whether the rank of latent matrices in matrix‑chain‑of‑thought (Matrix‑CODI) models influences performance on reasoning tasks. Across multiple training regimes on ProsQA and GSM8K‑Aug, rank‑k projection ablations show flat accuracy curves, indicating that truncating the latent matrix to low rank does not hurt performance. Experiments with various readout architectures—bilinear, bilinear‑plus‑GELU, SVD‑augmented, and quadratic—confirm that rank‑indifference persists even for nonlinear readouts, and a linear probe on the latent matrix underperforms a raw pretrained hidden state.
By Samuel Larson (Pebble ML)
Modern transformers pair impressive capabilities with substantial memory and compute demands. Low-rank weight factorization reduces both while keeping the matrices dense, and thus efficient on standar...
arXiv:2609.40127v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Modern transformers pair impressive capabilities with substantial memory and compute demands. Low-rank weight factorization reduces both while keepin...
By Massimo Bini, Anders Christensen, Stephan Alaniz, Judah Goldfeder, Ole Winther, Yann LeCun, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Zeynep Akata
The paper investigates whether the rank of matrix-valued latent representations in continuous chain‑of‑thought models influences task accuracy. Experiments on ProsQA and GSM8K‑Aug show that truncating the latent matrix to low rank has negligible effect (within 0.6 pp), and this flatness persists across various readout designs and even in a vanilla GPT‑2 baseline. The results suggest that rank is not a useful structural signal for these models’ reasoning paths.
arXiv:2607. 18759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers with relative positional encodings often extrapolate to sequences longer than those seen during training, whereas transformers with learned absolute encodings typically do not.
By Subham Singh, Ashutosh Mishra, Subha Raut
arXiv:2608. 04213v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing studies on self-supervised learning for white-box networks typically decouple the derivation of white-box networks via optimization algorithms from self-supervised learning paradigms.
By Yang Bai, Linyuan Wang, Haoyang Jiang, Nuolin Sun, Libin Hou, Bin Yan
arXiv:2508. 08289v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Attention is widely understood as an associative memory, but that description alone does not predict how the memory will behave.
By Mu Qiao
arXiv:2607. 18363v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Feed-forward networks hold two thirds of a transformer's non-embedding parameters, yet the architecture has not received a necessity test that controls parameters, compute, and depth at once.
By Henry Ndubuaku, Karen Mosoyan, Jakub Mroz, Noah Cylich, Satyajit Kumar, Parkirat Sandhu, Roman Shemet, Justin H Lee
arXiv:2607. 08946v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A transformer can be built from operators that are legible by construction -- bounded, named units that read as fuzzy set operations rather than dense activations -- but legibility must be pressed for during training, and the pressure has a failure mode.
By Mark Oskin
arXiv:2607. 23050v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural scaling laws describe how loss decreases as models, data, and compute grow, but they do not answer a prior question: for a fixed task, what is the minimum model capacity required to solve it?
By Byeong Hoon Yoon
arXiv:2609.27988v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Methods operating on Vision Transformer (ViT) feature spaces typically rely on Euclidean distance or cosine similarity. This assumes that every direc...
By Andrew Bond, Ege Erdem \"Ozl\"u, Tuna \c{C}imen, Ilkin Umut Melanlioglu, Tolga Birdal, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem
arXiv:2602. 18849v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a sensitivity analysis for transformer attention in a geometry aligned with tokenwise computation.
By Seyed Morteza Emadi