When 2D Tasks Meet 1D Serialization: On Serialization Friction in Structured Tasks
In the LLM era, many symbolic and structured problems are presented to models through 1D text serialization. Yet some such problems are natively two-dimensional: their relevant relations, such as row--column correspondence or spatial adjacency, are defined by position in a 2D layout rather than by sequential order. This raises a representational question: does preserving the same symbolic entries in a 1D sequence also preserve the relational structure needed for computation? We study this issue through the lens of serialization friction: the representational mismatch in which the same underlying task instances and entries are still present, but relations that depend on layout become impli...
| Authors | Chung-Hsiang Lo, Lu Li, Diji Yang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 May 2026 |
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