Looped Transformers under the Jacobian Lens: Does the Global Workspace Survive Recurrence?

Abstract

arXiv:2609.01924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work identifies a mid-depth band of verbalisable, causally potent representations in a standard feedforward transformer --- a functional analogue of a global workspace. Whether the same workspace functionality emerges when depth is implemented through recurrence rather than a stack of distinct layers remains unknown. Looped and depth-recurrent transformers provide a direct test of this question because they reuse the same weights across dept