When the Gradient Sees Rank: Provable Necessity, Causal Recruitment, and Composition in Trained Matrix Memories
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
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.
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 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.
arXiv:2606. 30067v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Neural Subspace Reallocation (NSR), which reframes continual learning as memory management over parameter subspaces.
arXiv:2605. 05189v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How many key-value associations can a $d\times d$ linear memory store?
We introduce Neural Subspace Reallocation (NSR), which reframes continual learning as memory management over parameter subspaces. Instead of treating Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules as disposable per-task adapters, NSR manages them as compressible, retrievable memory units on a frozen backbone through a recurring cycle: (1) compress learned LoRAs via SVD, (2) reserve them in a TaskKnowledgeBank, (3) recall related past LoRAs by embedding similarity to warm-start new or returning tasks, and (4) reallocate the active subspace accordingly, with distillation protecting prior tasks.