Circuit Synchronization Precedes Generalization: A Causal Precursor to Grokking
arXiv preprintIntroduces the Frequency Synchronization Degree (FSD), a permutation-tested metric for Fourier circuit synchronisation that requires no prior circuit knowledge. FSD predicts grokking 500-3,000 steps in advance across nine modular-addition configs (mean lead +1,722 steps), synchronising before a restricted-logit baseline in all nine. Weight-decay intervention at the FSD ceiling causally confirms the inter-phase gap is regularisation: ∆t ∝ 1/λ across three primes, with grokking at a near-constant memorisation norm. A basis-faithful FSD generalisation transfers to the non-abelian group S₅.


