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)
The paper investigates whether gradient-based training can learn the necessary rank to store and compose associations in a matrix memory. By training on $K$ key‑value bindings that require rank at least $K$ for exact linear recovery, the authors show that the learned effective rank increases with $K$ and that recovery sharply transitions near $k=K$ when rank is capped. Experiments demonstrate high recovery rates (cosine similarity >0.9) across multiple seeds and show that the trained operator approximates the ideal cycle on the entity subspace, though performance declines with larger matrix dimensions when encoder width is fixed.
By Samuel Larson
arXiv:2610.23343v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has become the standard method for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large pretrained models, yet theoretical explanations...
By Long Nguyen-Chi, Quynh Nguyen, Thanh Nguyen-Cung, Binh T. Nguyen
arXiv:2609.38901v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Representer explanations rank the training landmarks that most influence a self-supervised representation. At scale, this ranking rests on up to four s...
By Jayanta Mukherjee, Shourya Verma, Mengbo Wang, Jasorsi Ghosh, Ananth Grama
arXiv:2609.39263v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A concept subspace's effect on model behavior does not establish how it relates to the output readout. We introduce a two-sided geometric diagnostic th...
By Aojie Yuan, Zhiyuan Julian Su, Haiyue Zhang, Zijian Su
arXiv:2609. 12259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Matrix-valued memories make rank the natural budget of a learned representation: the number of independent directions a state spans bounds what it can bind, compose, and track.
By Samuel Larson
arXiv:2609.06341v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Linear algebra provides the framework of concepts (matrix rank, singular value decomposition (SVD), and eigendecomposition) that modern artificial in...
By Anjaneya Teja Sarma Kalvakolanu
Low-rank adaptation fixes the rank of the update, but it does not identify which parts of a trained
write actually carry behavior. We study that question directly and show that behaviorally effectiv...
arXiv:2606. 15036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We train a two-layer transformer encoder to classify rational elliptic curves $E/\mathbb{Q}$ of conductor $\leq 10000$ as either rank 0 or rank 1 from the first 128 normalized Frobenius traces.
By Pranav Venkata Konda
The paper investigates which parts of a low‑rank adaptation (LoRA) update actually drive behavior in language models. It shows that behaviorally effective LoRA writes are sparse, structured, and highly concentrated, with only a few module‑wise components carrying most of the signal. Using a learned‑basis continuation recipe, the authors demonstrate that these sparse, structured writes can be recovered with minimal error and that they remain robust across different training continuations and evaluation tasks.
By Haruto Sato, Yuki Tanaka, Ren Nakamura, Aoi Kobayashi, Mei Ito
arXiv:2608. 15351v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Nominal LoRA rank is a design parameter; calibrated spectral evidence is a separate inferential quantity.
By Mohammed Ahnouch, Lotfi Elaachak
Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is the standard way to fine-tune large models, yet when its two factors are trained independently, the update ignores the geometry of the low-rank weight change it induces. We introduce LoRA-TSD, an optimizer that treats every LoRA step as a tangent vector of the fixed-rank matrix manifold and takes the spectral-norm steepest-descent step of Muon inside that tangent space, mapping the result back to the factors through a retraction native to the LoRA parametrization.