Recursive State-Augmented Language Models: Persistent Latent-State Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models

arXiv:2611.16375v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models rely on finite token contexts, limiting access to earlier interactions. We introduce Recursive State-Augmented Language Models (Recursive SALM), a framework in which a persistent latent state evolves with each observation and generates adaptations of a pretrained language model. A modular read-transition-write architecture separates observation encoding, latent dynamics, and predictor adaptation. We develop deterministic and stochastic formulations. The experiments evaluate only deterministic SALM with frozen GPT-2 small and exclude earlier evidence from its decoder context. On a four-turn hypothesis-inference task, latent-gated LoRA reaches 89.1% accuracy, comparable to 88.0% for a trained full-context LoRA baseline, with earlier evidence available solely through a 64-dimensional state. Zeroing or shuffling the state substantially reduces accuracy. In a two-turn task with codewords unseen in training, several interfaces improve candidate ranking over chance, but rarely generate the exact codeword under the evaluated training schedule. These experiments show that persistent latent-conditioned adaptation can support sequential inference when earlier evidence is absent from the decoder context.