新闻 · arXiv cs.LG

What Makes a Representational Prior Work? Feature Families, Label-Free Invariances, and Critical Windows in Grokking

Companion work showed the grokking delay is causally the time to form task-structured representations, injectable via a contrastive prior. Here we characterize what makes such a prior work, across four axes, in 188 new runs. Content: a coherent, learnable prior built from the wrong feature family (magnitude bands) blocks generalization like a random partition (1/15 vs 0/20 grok; $p=0.43$ between them), confirming the companion's prediction that priors act at the level of the circuit's features.…