The theory of state tracking in recurrent architectures has predominantly focused on expressive capacity: whether a fixed architecture can theoretically realize a set of symbolic transition rules. We argue that equally important is error control, the dynamics governing hidden-state drift along the directions that distinguish symbolic states. We prove that affine recurrent networks, a class of models encompassing State-Space Models and Linear Attention, cannot correct errors along state-separating subspaces once they preserve state representations. Consequently, practical affine trackers do not learn robust state tracking; rather, they learn finite-horizon solutions governed by accumulated state-relevant error. We characterize the mechanics of this failure, showing that tracking remains readable only while the accumulating within-class spread remains small relative to the between-class separation. We demonstrate empirically on group state-tracking tasks that this breakdown is predictable: tracking collapses when the distinguishability ratio crosses the readability threshold. Across trained models, the point of this crossing predicts the horizon at which downstream accuracy fails. These results establish that robust state tracking is determined not only by an architecture's theoretical expressivity but crucially by its error control.
Junhyeok Kim Yonsei University, Jaewoo Park, Junhee Park Yonsei University, Sangeyl Lee Yonsei University, Jiwan Chung, Jisung Kim LG AI Research, Ji Hoon Joung Euler Robotics, Youngjae Yu Seoul National University, Seoul National University and Yonsei University
For people affected by blindness and low vision (BLV), safe and independent navigation remains a major challenge, impacting over 2.2 billion individuals worldwide. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer new opportunities for assistive navigation, progress has been limited by the scarcity of accessibility-aware datasets, requiring labor-intensive, expert annotation. To this end, we introduce GuideDog, a novel dataset containing 22K image-description pairs (2K human-verified) capturing real-world pedestrian scenes across 46 countries. Our human-AI pipeline shifts annotation from generation to verification, grounded in established BLV guidance standards from experts and research, improving scalability while maintaining quality. We also present GuideDogQA, an 818-sample benchmark evaluating object recognition and depth perception. Experiments reveal that depth perception and adherence to these standards remain challenging for current MLLMs. Code and dataset will be publicly available.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表