Abstract:Recurrent models must forget in order to remember, yet the state of the art decides what to erase without consulting what is stored -- the gate sees only the arriving token, not the memory it is about to modify. This memory-blind gating is one of three coupled defects in the leading delta-rule architecture (GDN-2): the value-axis erase mask wastes parameters at the scale of the value projection, and -- as we prove -- mathematically prevents the WY-form triangular chunk solver that makes recurrent training competitive with Transformers. We introduce CARVE (Content-Aware Recurrent with Value Efficiency), which resolves all three problems through one principle: erase only on the key axis. This is provably necessary and sufficient for the WY-form solver to remain valid. Within it, CARVE reuses the recurrent output tensor -- already written to GPU memory -- as a free content signal for the erase gate, and replaces the per-value write-gate projection with a single scalar per head. At initialisation CARVE is bit-identical to GDN-2; any quality difference emerges from what the content gate learns. At 1.3B parameters trained on 100B tokens, CARVE achieves WikiText perplexity 15.72 (minus 0.18 vs. GDN-2, a 4.5-sigma effect), leads every recurrent baseline on nine common-sense reasoning benchmarks, and sets state of the art on every RULER retrieval probe -- at 0.4% throughput overhead, 13% lower peak memory, and 19% fewer parameters. Six formal theorems cover memory capacity, Lyapunov stability, gradient flow, expressivity separation, Pareto-optimal chunk size, and hybrid optimality.
Abstract:Animal tracking and pose estimation systems, such as STEP (Simultaneous Tracking and Pose Estimation) and ViTPose, experience substantial performance drops when processing images and videos with cage structures and systematic occlusions. We present a three-stage preprocessing pipeline that addresses this limitation through: (1) cage segmentation using a Gabor-enhanced ResNet-UNet architecture with tunable orientation filters, (2) cage inpainting using CRFill for content-aware reconstruction of occluded regions, and (3) evaluation of pose estimation and tracking on the uncaged frames. Our Gabor-enhanced segmentation model leverages orientation-aware features with 72 directional kernels to accurately identify and segment cage structures that severely impair the performance of existing methods. Experimental validation demonstrates that removing cage occlusions through our pipeline enables pose estimation and tracking performance comparable to that in environments without occlusions. We also observe significant improvements in keypoint detection accuracy and trajectory consistency.