Paper Detail
Aur Shalev Merin
Recurrent networks do not need Jacobian propagation to adapt online. The hidden state already carries temporal credit through the forward pass; immediate derivatives suffice if you stop corrupting them with stale trace memory and normalize gradient scales across parameter groups. An architectural rule predicts when normalization is needed: \b{eta}2 is required when gradients must pass through a nonlinear state update with no output bypass, and unnecessary otherwise. Across ten architectures, real primate neural data, and streaming ML benchmarks, immediate derivatives with RMSprop match or exceed full RTRL, scaling to n = 1024 at 1000x less memory.
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@article{merin2026temporal,
title = {Temporal Credit Is Free},
author = {Aur Shalev Merin},
year = {2026},
abstract = {Recurrent networks do not need Jacobian propagation to adapt online. The hidden state already carries temporal credit through the forward pass; immediate derivatives suffice if you stop corrupting them with stale trace memory and normalize gradient scales across parameter groups. An architectural rule predicts when normalization is needed: \textbackslash{}b\{eta\}2 is required when gradients must pass through a nonlinear state update with no output bypass, and unnecessary otherwise. Across ten architectures, rea},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28750},
keywords = {cs.LG},
eprint = {2603.28750},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}