The Vanishing Quotient: When More Training Erases Arithmetic Skills
TL;DR for operators A compact AI model can learn a numerical procedure, perform it successfully in testing, and then lose that capability during further training. Sourabh Kasliwal’s study of tiny Transformers1 illustrates this sharply: a model correctly solved 86.67% of 300 division problems with single-digit divisors, but its accuracy on that same subset fell to 0% after another 20,000 mathematical training steps. ...