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.
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: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:2609.38901v1 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: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:2609.06341v1 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