{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/dynamical-phases-of-short-term-memory","title":"Dynamical phases of short-term memory mechanisms in RNNs","arxiv_id":"2502.17433","date":"2025-02-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Bariscan Kurtkaya","Fatih Dinc","Mert Yuksekgonul","Marta Blanco-Pozo","Ege Cirakman","Mark Schnitzer","Yucel Yemez","Hidenori Tanaka","Peng Yuan","Nina Miolane"],"abstract":"Short-term memory is essential for cognitive processing, yet our understanding of its neural mechanisms remains unclear. Neuroscience has long focused on how sequential activity patterns, where neurons fire one after another within large networks, can explain how information is maintained. While recurrent connections were shown to drive sequential dynamics, a mechanistic understanding of this process still remains unknown. In this work, we introduce two unique mechanisms that can support this form of short-term memory: slow-point manifolds generating direct sequences or limit cycles providing temporally localized approximations. Using analytical models, we identify fundamental properties that govern the selection of each mechanism. Precisely, on short-term memory tasks (delayed cue-discrimination tasks), we derive theoretical scaling laws for critical learning rates as a function of the delay period length, beyond which no learning is possible. We empirically verify these results by training and evaluating approximately 80,000 recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which are publicly available for further analysis. Overall, our work provides new insights into short-term memory mechanisms and proposes experimentally testable predictions for systems neuroscience.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17433v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17433v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2502.17433","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2502.17433","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2502.17433"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/fatihdinc/dynamical-phases-stm","reach":null}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"found_in_text":{"samples":1,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"2d5984160033050a","entry":"train_rnn_model","repo":"fatihdinc/dynamical-phases-stm","repo_kind":"found_in_text","path":"Experiments/rnn-large-nopost/broad/train_parallel.py","file_url":"https://github.com/fatihdinc/dynamical-phases-stm/blob/HEAD/Experiments/rnn-large-nopost/broad/train_parallel.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"2d5984160033050a"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}