arXiv:2606. 16730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal self-attention is a coupling mechanism: each token's hidden state is updated by a learned mixture of preceding tokens at the same timescale.
arXiv:2606. 16730v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We re-interpret Transformer pretraining as a fast-slow, singularly perturbed flow along depth, with untied weights as its non-autonomous feature.
The paper investigates the training dynamics of attention mechanisms in high-dimensional settings, focusing on attention-indexed models that encompass multi-layer and multi-head architectures. It shows that while the loss landscape can be described by a finite set of trace order parameters, the online stochastic gradient descent dynamics involve an infinite hierarchy of matrix moments that can be accurately approximated by a finite truncated system. The study further reveals that the choice of attention parameterization acts as an implicit bias: untied attention can get trapped in uninformative states, whereas tied attention induces symmetry breaking and enables weak recovery with θ(d² log d) samples, and untied attention exhibits a fast-slow dynamic leading to weak recovery when symmetry is broken.
arXiv:2607. 04333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grokking -- generalization arriving long after training-set interpolation -- can be accelerated by structure-agnostic interventions: gradient filtering, weight-norm clamping, geometric penalties on hidden representations.
arXiv:2606. 21253v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continual learning that is gradient-free, local, online, and append-only is attractive for edge and streaming deployment, but its value is usually argued informally.
arXiv:2606. 09929v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical reservoir computing harnesses nonlinear mechanical dynamics but, by convention, freezes the substrate and trains only a linear readout, presuming the substrate is not usefully trainable.
Long-range learning is hard for recurrent networks trained with stochastic gradient descent, because the influence of a past input fades with the lag $\ell$, and if it fades too fast the dependence cannot be learned from finite data. This fade is captured by an envelope $f(\ell)$.
Selective state space models (SSMs) use a recurrence to mix token information, a process analogous to attention in transformers. By modeling token evolution as an ordinary differential equation and applying input‑to‑state stability, the study proves that SSMs exhibit local exponential stability of consensus equilibria and delineates their domain of attraction for time‑varying weight matrices. Experiments on a pretrained Mamba‑2 model reveal that the output gate controls the degree of consensus, preventing tokens from fully converging.
arXiv:2606. 29519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-range learning is hard for recurrent networks trained with stochastic gradient descent, because the influence of a past input fades with the lag $\ell$, and if it fades too fast the dependence cannot be learned from finite data.
arXiv:2608. 03629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A companion paper studies when activation patching and weight-space ablation agree, inside an idealized model where a conditional computation is carried additively through a residual stream.
arXiv:2607. 14571v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce \emph{gate-zero growth}, a function-preserving (FP) operator for continual learning that adds new residual blocks through a zero-initialised gate.
arXiv:2605. 23393v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability of transformers requires identifying not just which components matter but how they compose into the computational route that produced a prediction.
arXiv:2602. 18849v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a sensitivity analysis for transformer attention in a geometry aligned with tokenwise computation.