Measuring Dead Directions: Decomposing and Classifying Singular Structure off Canonical Alignment
arXiv:2607. 00603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We give a descent-free, alignment-free measurement of singular structure on trained networks.
arXiv:2606. 19491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained transformers sit near singular minima of the loss, where the Fisher information metric degenerates along dead directions: directions in parameter space along which the directional Fisher vanishes.
arXiv:2607. 00603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We give a descent-free, alignment-free measurement of singular structure on trained networks.
A deep network's loss is invariant to continuous symmetries of its parameters: the logit shift, the ReLU rescaling, the LayerNorm scale, the per-head attention rotation. Adam's per-coordinate preconditioner drifts along each symmetry orbit, which pulls the trajectory off the symmetry quotient where the optimization lives and blurs the singular-learning rate the quotient makes readable.
arXiv:2606. 29176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A deep network's loss is invariant to continuous symmetries of its parameters: the logit shift, the ReLU rescaling, the LayerNorm scale, the per-head attention rotation.
arXiv:2606. 05957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Singular learning theory and information geometry have studied the same parameter spaces in mostly separate vocabularies: the former computes Bayesian invariants in resolved coordinates, the latter works in original coordinates under a non-degeneracy assumption that overparameterised models routinely violate.
arXiv:2608. 10251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A transformer's answer lives on one axis: the direction its unembedding reads.
arXiv:2606. 31963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern LLM workflows move coordinate-indexed objects across checkpoints: steering vectors, sparse autoencoders, top-$k$ neuron sets, attribution lists, and merge alignments.
arXiv:2607. 16821v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Task arithmetic, sequential fine-tuning, activation steering, and first-order random search all operate through relatively small perturbations around an already trained checkpoint, and they rely on different local approximations: individual perturbations should be first-order predictable, task updates should compose with controlled interference, useful tangent structure should be stable and possible to estimate, and weight edits should have counterparts in representation space.
arXiv:2608. 16925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We build an instrument that reads, from a single fit and with no oracle, whether the operator a hybrid PDE-parameter estimator postulates is wrong-and separates that from a merely unidentifiable parameter.
arXiv:2607. 23711v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LoRA fine-tuning can create intruder dimensions: new leading singular vectors of the updated weight matrix $W+BA$ that are nearly orthogonal to all pretrained singular vectors and that drive catastrophic forgetting.
arXiv:2606. 02596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The curvature exponent $\alpha$ in $h_k \propto \sigma_k^\alpha$ -- governing how Hessian eigenvalues scale with gradient singular values -- varies systematically across layer types ($\alpha \approx 2$ for convolutions, $\approx 1$ for transformer attention, $< 1$ for MLP up-projections).
arXiv:2607. 12501v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Forward-Forward algorithm trains each layer locally, so that a scalar goodness - the sum of squared activations - is high on real inputs and low on contrastive ones.
arXiv:2606. 04752v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformers consuming multi-channel scalar signals must embed $C$ simultaneous values into one $d_{\text{model}}$-dimensional vector per time step.