Skip to content

Visualizing memory states in transformers

Presentation Ayse Demir

In transformers, memory is actively retained. Each token is generated by conditioning on prior context, and the model's active state is shaped by what it holds from the past. This talk focuses on making transformers' memory states visible and interpretable. The first part presents a visual vocabulary for retention — attention across layers, attention-entropy landscapes, KV-cache retention fields, and memory-injection overlays — that renders the model's holding of the past perceptible. The second part turns from visualization to applied demonstration. For instrumentation, I use change-point…

Event: Protocol Symposium 2026, Friday, September 25, 2026

Slides and papers

Shared by the speakers for the symposium. Email addresses have been removed.

Related resources

Talk

A Common Protocol for Composable, Modular Organizations

Simone Cicero of Boundaryless presents O2A (Open Organisation Alliance), a proposed open standard for making organizations 'composable' by replacing implicit coordination mechanisms like hierarchy and meetings with an explicit, machine-readable contract graph of units, offerings, and relationships. He argues the protocol's compact grammar—three economic primitives (purchase, revenue split, investment) plus composition mechanisms—can represent bespoke institutional arrangements like Haier's Rendanheyi model or joint ventures as 'sentences' in a common organizational language, becoming essential as AI agents enter firms and transaction costs collapse.

company-world-model-for-agentic-coordination composable-organization contract-graph-common-alphabet-of-units-and-offerings

Simone Cicero

Presentation

AI Kitcraft: A Hands-On AI Tooling Workshop

Most teams 'adopt AI' by buying new, and mostly untested software, then wait for a productivity jump that never shows up in the numbers. That missing productivity is the signature of the stage we are actually in: the Kit phase. Every general-purpose technology — the steam engine, the Model T, the PC — passes through it: loose components people tinker with, repurpose, and master by doing, long before anyone builds the firm-scale machinery that turns tinkering into measured output. Farmers ran corn shellers and water pumps off jacked-up Model Ts for years before Ford watched them and built the…

symposium-2026 protocols

Rafael Fernández, Sachin Benny

Talk

Archival Time as a New Natural Resource

Sachin Benny argues that AI modernity is reorganizing our relationship to the past the way industrial capitalism reorganized our relationship to the future, coining 'Archival Time' as a condition where traces of prior events become retrievable without recreating the event. He contrasts this with Bakhtin's 'Carnival Time,' bounded periods where accumulated traces lose authority and things get unmade and remade, drawing on William Sewell's eventfulness framework (path dependency, temporal heterogeneity, contingency) to argue eventful history requires a mix of both archival inheritance and carnivalesque rupture.

archival-time-vs-carnival-time archival-vs-carnivalist-interfaces eventfulness-sewell

Sachin Benny