A Held-Out Transition-Pair Falsifier for Long-Horizon Non-Abelian State Tracking
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
State tracking exposes a sharp limitation of sequence models: the relevant signal is often not a summary of observed tokens, but an ordered latent state that evolves through non-commutative transformations. We introduce a held-out transition-pair falsifier for finite non-Abelian group tracking. The protocol forbids selected ordered generator pairs during training and requires the same local patterns during evaluation, blocking one direct local-transition memorization pathway. In a controlled S3 × S3 benchmark, a projected recurrent state model trained only on length-8 sequences produces error-free final-state predictions (perfect 250/250 per horizon) through evaluation horizons up to 1,048,576 tokens across five seeds. Matched native-readout baselines, including bag, GRU, and a single-configuration structured state-space model, remain near floor under the same protocol. Projection-matched GRU, structured SSM, and bag baselines equipped with analogous finite-group prototype readouts also remain near chance under the same split. Mechanism diagnostics show that hard projection coincides with low homomorphism error, low state-consistency drift, and non-trivial commutator separation, while softened projection collapses final-state accuracy. Clean-split audits verify zero verbatim reduced-word overlap and zero structural-template overlap between training and evaluation partitions. The evidence is scoped to this controlled finite-group falsifier rather than to a general architecture ranking. Within that regime, explicit projected non-commutative state composition acts as a useful inductive bias for long-horizon hidden-state tracking.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 4 of its 8 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2026.
Builds on
4 of 8 references.
References · 4
- 2024The Illusion of State in State-Space Modelscited by 187
- 2025Structured Sparse Transition Matrices to Enable State Tracking in State-Space Modelscited by 16
- 2026The Expressive Limits of Diagonal SSMs for State-Trackingcited by 9
- 2026On the "Induction Bias" in Sequence Modelscited by 2
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
- 2026A Calibrated Test of Internal Action Maps: State Signals Without Global Affine Closurecited by 0
- 2026The Automaton Underneath: The Additive Input Pathway Is a Parasitic Attractor for State Tracking in Householder Linear RNNcited by 0
- 2026Tracking States or Tracking Cosets? An Algebraic Account of Learned State Trackingcited by 0
- 2026Tracking States or Tracking Cosets? An Algebraic Account of Learned State Tracking24 Sep 2026
- 2026A Calibrated Test of Internal Action Maps: State Signals Without Global Affine Closure13 Aug 2026
- 2026The Automaton Underneath: The Additive Input Pathway Is a Parasitic Attractor for State Tracking in Householder Linear RNN16 Jul 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Rethinking State Tracking in Recurrent Models Through Error Control Dynamics
- 2026Length-Independent State Tracking Under a Parallel Scan
- 2026Long-Horizon State Tracking in LLMs: Executing MD5 through a Deep Sequence of Dependent Tool Calls
- 2026Non-Commutative State Tracking with Input-Dependent Low-Rank Updates in Mamba-3
- 2026Naju: A Native Discrete State-Space Model with Independent Retention and Writing for Long-Sequence Memory
- 2025Scaling Laws for State Dynamics in Large Language Models
- 2026State Propagation Also Satisfies: A Complex-Valued State-Space Model for Deterministic State Tracking
- 2025Finite State Automata Inside Transformers with Chain-of-Thought: A Mechanistic Study on State Tracking