Capability Emergence Can Be Forecast: Per-Seed, In Advance, With Calibrated Intervals, Certified False Alarms, and a Blind Pre-Registered Gate
Emergent capabilities are widely treated as unpredictable: loss improves smoothly while abilities appear abruptly. Prior work offers early-warning indicators but never scores them as forecasts: no lead time at controlled false-alarm rate, no calibration, no negatives, no blind tests. We supply that discipline and show that, in grokking model systems and small language models, emergence timing is forecastable per run, in advance, with calibrated uncertainty. Across 30 transformers at identical configuration, the formation time of the previous-token head forecasts each seed's induction-head emergence at Spearman rho=0.977 with median lead 975 steps (~15% of training); a best-case loss rule ...
| Authors | Gunner Levi Howe |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 17 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 July 2026 |
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