{"paper":{"title":"Learning Dynamics of Chain-of-Thought State Tracking in a Solvable Transformer Model","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["physics.data-an"],"primary_cat":"cond-mat.dis-nn","authors_text":"Bernd Rosenow, Marcel K\\\"uhn, Matthias Thamm, Niklas Forner","submitted_at":"2026-06-16T17:01:57Z","abstract_excerpt":"Chain-of-thought generation can turn a multi-step computation into a sequence of locally checkable state updates, but the training dynamics by which transformers acquire such updates remain poorly understood. We study this question in a solvable setting: a simplified one-block transformer trained by supervised next-token prediction on state sequences generated by composing permutations. The architecture separates fixed-lag action retrieval, learned by RoPE attention, from a specialized MLP logic module that applies the retrieved permutation to the current state. Using a statistical-physics mea"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.18164","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.18164/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}