From Gradients to Riccati Geometry: Kalman World Models for Single-Pass Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Kiruluta, Andrew
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917340704145408
author Kiruluta, Andrew
author_facet Kiruluta, Andrew
contents Backpropagation dominates modern machine learning, yet it is not the only principled method for optimizing dynamical systems. We propose Kalman World Models (KWM), a class of learned state-space models trained via recursive Bayesian filtering rather than reverse-mode automatic differentiation. Instead of gradient descent updates, we replace parameter learning with Kalman-style gain adaptation. Training becomes online filtering; error signals become innovations. We further extend this framework to transformer-based large language models (LLMs), where internal activations are treated as latent dynamical states corrected via innovation terms. This yields a gradient-free training and adaptation paradigm grounded in control theory. We derive stability conditions, analyze computational complexity, and provide empirical results on sequence modeling tasks demonstrating competitive performance with improved robustness and continual adaptation properties.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_13423
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Gradients to Riccati Geometry: Kalman World Models for Single-Pass Learning
Kiruluta, Andrew
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Backpropagation dominates modern machine learning, yet it is not the only principled method for optimizing dynamical systems. We propose Kalman World Models (KWM), a class of learned state-space models trained via recursive Bayesian filtering rather than reverse-mode automatic differentiation. Instead of gradient descent updates, we replace parameter learning with Kalman-style gain adaptation. Training becomes online filtering; error signals become innovations. We further extend this framework to transformer-based large language models (LLMs), where internal activations are treated as latent dynamical states corrected via innovation terms. This yields a gradient-free training and adaptation paradigm grounded in control theory. We derive stability conditions, analyze computational complexity, and provide empirical results on sequence modeling tasks demonstrating competitive performance with improved robustness and continual adaptation properties.
title From Gradients to Riccati Geometry: Kalman World Models for Single-Pass Learning
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13423