arXiv AI

Where Grokking Happens: Distributed Utility and Fourier Recoding Without a Module Switch

The paper investigates where the transition from memorization to generalization occurs within a Transformer. Using Transition Games—activation games with paired non-generalizing controls—it finds that distributed utility gain is driven by a block‑0 attention bias, with degree‑two modes explaining 67–92% of the contrast across replacement games. A detailed path study shows that block‑1 MLP mediates more of this effect than other downstream paths, contradicting the common "MLP memorizes, attention generalizes" hypothesis and suggesting that grokking is a spectral recoding of an existing distributed circuit rather than a module switch.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 10

What to Keep, What to Forget: A Rate--Distortion View of Memory Compaction in LLMs and Agents

arXiv:2607. 08032v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models, and the agents built on them, spend an ever-growing share of their compute and memory on remembering: caching attention keys and values, carrying long prompts, maintaining recurrent state, and storing what happened in previous turns and sessions.

By Ashwin Gerard Colaco, Nada Lahjouji
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.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

Recursive Experiential-Working Memory Evolution for Long-Horizon Agent Harnesses

The paper introduces Recuris, a recursive Experiential‑Working Memory architecture that lets long‑horizon agents track task progress and select skills based on current needs rather than full history. By coupling working memory with experiential memory, execution becomes structured evidence that localizes failures to specific memory components, enabling a bounded recursive memory‑evolution loop. Across four benchmarks and ten models, Recuris improves task success in 35 of 37 model‑benchmark pairs, raising state‑of‑the‑art performance on tau‑bench and SkillFlow and reducing common long‑horizon failures by up to 80%.

By Zhaochen Yu, Yingcheng Wu, Zhenfei Yin, Kaiyuan Chen, Zhe Zhao, Mengdi Wang, Shuicheng Yan, Ling Yang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 19

Anisotropic Representation Dynamics in Transformers

The paper introduces a Mixture‑Gated Theory of Anisotropic Representation Dynamics that decomposes Transformer self‑attention into value transport, query gating, and key gating. It shows that the geometry of attended representations can cause a representation difference to contract or expand, a phenomenon termed gating‑induced regime switching. The authors derive a spectral criterion to predict switching, quantify its strength, and identify subspaces where switching occurs, validating these predictions experimentally across four Transformer architectures.

By Nguyen Do, My T. Thai
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 20

DualKV: Shared-Prompt Flash Attention for Efficient RL Training with Large Rollouts and Long Contexts

arXiv:2605. 15422v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern RL post-training methods such as GRPO and DAPO train on N response sequences of R tokens sampled from a shared prompt of P tokens, but standard FlashAttention replicates all P prompt tokens N times across both forward and backward passes -- duplicating compute and memory on identical hidden states.

By Jiading Gai, Shuai Zhang, Xiang Song, Bernie Wang, George Karypis