Reproduce “The Ignition Is Real, and It Lives at the Readout: Latent composition, difficulty-clocked ignition, and the interface-constituted commit in a recurrent-depth reasoner” on OpenResearch
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About this paper
Simon Lam-Muir
Research at Prime Calibre empirically characterized 'compositional ignition' in latent-reasoning models as an interface-constituted 'commit surface', where silent computation transforms into a stable, difficulty-clocked decision at the readout. This investigation rejected the MIRROR hypothesis by demonstrating the signature's emergence in models trained exclusively on non-verbal synthetic structure, and refined understanding of the commit mechanism as a specific, directional event rather than a general output artifact.
Key insights
- The 'compositional ignition' is an 'interface-constituted commit' — a distinct event at the readout rather than a stable internal broadcast stage, where silently composed computation manifests as a discrete decision.
- The decision commitment involves a significant margin jump and a 'snap' in the raw state's readout-relevant direction, followed by a 'freeze' of directional change, while readout-null state magnitude continues to grow.
- The full ignition signature can emerge in models trained exclusively on non-verbal synthetic structure, indicating it is not necessarily inherited from human language training data (rejecting the MIRROR hypothesis).
Summary by alphaXiv.
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