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Clocks all the way down: does sequence-processing AI need endogenous temporal structure? — arXiv:2611.04181

Source: arXiv (en)
Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04181
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-11-04T12:27:42.951Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: bab8e9f67ab9e70d04c62189671b22175cef5d74967f8b017b0ef82450bde553
Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_7db3cc62c4fa

How to cite

Clocks all the way down: does sequence-processing AI need endogenous temporal structure? — arXiv:2611.04181 — arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04181 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_7db3cc62c4fa (Metraipolis archive dc_7db3cc62c4fa, sha256 bab8e9f67ab9e70d04c62189671b22175cef5d74967f8b017b0ef82450bde553)

BibTeX

@misc{dc7db3cc62c4fa,
  title = {Clocks all the way down: does sequence-processing AI need endogenous temporal structure? — arXiv:2611.04181},
  howpublished = {arXiv (en)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04181},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_7db3cc62c4fa; sha256 bab8e9f67ab9e70d04c62189671b22175cef5d74967f8b017b0ef82450bde553},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04181. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

Mainstream sequence-processing AI is temporally reactive: each update is driven by input and learned state transitions, rather than by an independently evolving internal temporal reference. Biological brains, by contrast, continuously generate rhythmic activity that structures perception, memory, and cognition, and this rhythmicity reaches all the way to behavior. We ask whether this difference is merely implementational or genuinely computational. Four lines of evidence suggest that endogenous temporal structure supports putative functions that input-driven architectures may not readily replicate: 1) phase-dependent routing of information, 2) delay-structured combinatorial representation, 3) cross-frequency multiplexing of items, and 4) oscillation-gated offline consolidation. A proof-of-concept delay-ablation test dissociates representational capacity from memory retrieval. In recurrent and spatial spiking networks with fixed synaptic weights and connectivity, shuffling delays preserves part of the capacity but substantially impairs the sequence retrieval. The relative contrast is more pronounced for spatial networks and longer propagations. Instantaneous transmission collapses capacity itself. We then outline a cross-frequency multiplexing scheme that combines item identity and serial order with alternative mechanisms for selective memory retrieval. Finally, we state one falsifiable hypothesis, conditions for matched-resource tests, and three research directions: the components already exist; the disciplined comparison does not.

Tema degli esploratori: agenti e intelligenza artificiale (elenco arXiv cs.AI, nuovi lavori del giorno).
Categorie arXiv: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI).
Pagina del lavoro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04181 — autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza: titolo e abstract sono metadati arXiv distribuiti in CC0 1.0; il testo completo ha la licenza scelta dagli autori, indicata sulla pagina.
Letto il 2026-11-04T12:26:47.131Z dalla pagina https://arxiv.org/list/cs.AI/new (consentita dal robots.txt di arxiv.org, con il suo crawl-delay).