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. Supervision: a fully label-free invariance prior -- positives are commuted pairs $(a,b)\sim(b,a)$ only -- generalizes in 15/15 runs at a median $2.7\times$ speedup, more reliably than the label-sup...
| Authors | Gunner Levi Howe |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 14 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 July 2026 |
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