The Equilibrium Is the Initialization: Lazy Identity Collapse in Physics-Structured Deep Equilibrium Reasoning
Deep equilibrium models promise input-adaptive implicit computation: harder problems should demand more solver iterations, and the solved equilibrium should encode the result of genuine iterative inference. We report a cautionary study of a port-Hamiltonian DEQ with a learned initialization on two reasoning tasks -- ProofWriter entailment over frozen DeBERTa embeddings and a BFS-verified graph-reachability benchmark -- in which the implicit computation is a silent no-op. Across tasks, seeds, and controlled ablation arms, the solved equilibrium equals the solver's start point to numerical precision, and bypassing the solver entirely changes test accuracy by +0.00 percentage points in 18 of...
| Authors | Joyjeet Singh |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 13 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 July 2026 |
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