Kathleen: Oscillator-Based Byte-Level Text Classification Without Tokenization or Attention

We present Kathleen, a text classification architecture that operates directly on raw UTF-8 bytes using frequency-domain processing -- requiring no tokenizer, no attention mechanism, and under 470K parameters. Kathleen introduces several novel components: (1) RecurrentOscillatorBanks -- damped sinusoid convolutions with temporal memory for O(L) sequence processing; (2) an FFT-Rotate Wavetable Encoder that maps all 256 byte values using a single learnable vector (256 floats); (3) PhaseHarmonics -- a sinusoidal non-linearity with just 6 learnable phase parameters (+2.6% accuracy, <0.001% of model parameters); (4) Content-Dependent Reverb with Positional Decay Modulation -- a temporal memory...

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