Definition
Plain language
Keeping straight where things currently stand after a long series of changes.
As stated in the literature
Maintaining an accurate representation of the evolving problem configuration across a generation, which transformers must recompute from the visible prefix each step since they carry no persistent scratch memory.
Also called: state maintenance
Why it matters: Without reliable state tracking a model will confidently propose moves that are illegal or pointless, and long multi-step tasks unravel a few steps in.
For example, after fifteen described moves, a model has to know which disk is now on which peg in order to pick a legal sixteenth move.
Heard on the show
“They talk about wanting structured candidate-state tracking — basically, force the hub to maintain hard pass-fail tables on each constraint, separately from the prose summaries.”Episode 083 — Training the Translator: How a Small Communication Model Lets Agent Teams Outperform Themselves