Same path, different: a mechanistic comparison of looped and stacked transformer encoders on 12-lead ECG

Recurrent Transformers reusing their weights rather than stacking L distinct layers are becoming widely adopted due to their parameter efficiency [1,2,3]. However, the exact representational and dynamical differences between looped and stacked architectures remain uncharacterized. This paper presents a controlled study on the example of bViT model [1] applying one weight-tied block L times. We train two models: bViT and standard ViT [4] on 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) classification tasks from the PTB-XL dataset under identical training protocols. Despite an 8.9× parameter reduction, bViT achieves accuracy parity with ViT. Geometric similarity metrics demonstrate that both architectures construct comparable latent representations in an equivalent canonical order. Crucially, their dynamics differ: bViT exhibits smaller step sizes and inter-patient sensitivity, as well as near-neutral behavior away from the data manifold, whereas ViT exhibits collapsing dimensionality of representations and out-of-distribution feature expansion.