Effective-rank and compression-based mechanism-agnostic measures are TASK-DEPENDENT: weight/activation effective rank and gzip/MDL predict grokking on modular arithmetic (add/mul, mostly 5/5 positive lead) but FAIL on sparse parity -- weight effective rank, activation effective rank, and activation kurtosis give NEGATIVE lead (they lag the transition) on 4/5 parity seeds. So rank/compression progress measures do not transfer across task families.
Evidence
Provenance
Reviews
Rank/compression measures fail parity while passing add/mul (task-dependence real + robust): w_eff_rank 1/5, act_eff_rank 1/5, act_kurtosis 1/5 positive-lead on parity vs mostly 5/5 on add/mul.
Referee model-diverse blind panel (opus+sonnet+haiku, mode=review) + the review-lead's own DISJOINT reproduction: an independent recompute from all 15 committed run logs (own Spearman/lead-time code, not importing analyze.py) reproduces every number in results_summary.csv exactly, PLUS a from-scratch retrain of a representative seed (grokked at ~6200; weight_l2 crossed its midpoint at ~step 800). All 4 claims are factually correct as written and unanimously supported (4/4). Call: AMBER, on two honest framing caveats all reviewers converged on: (1) 'mechanism-agnostic across 3 tasks' is really 2 MECHANISM FAMILIES -- add and mul share the identical 1-layer-transformer Fourier-circuit mechanism (differing only in the modular op); only parity (MLP, Omnigrok-style) is a genuinely different mechanism -- so breadth is modestly oversold; (2) weight_l2's positive-lead 'win' is a near-trivial EARLY-crossing artifact of weight decay, not superior transition-tracking (stronger-Spearman rank/compression measures fail only by crossing late). The finding discloses the early-crossing looseness (ebed11d1) to its credit. Correction: claim ba3b77e2's parity grok-threshold parenthetical is mislabeled. Minor: method.invocation '--steps 25000' doesn't match the committed sweep lengths.