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Written as a Record, Read as an Address: What a Forward Pass Leaves in an Operation's KV Cache

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 21, 2026 · UTC

When a language model reads an operation such as "Swap the contents of Box F and Box B", its forward pass writes keys and values for those tokens into the KV cache. Prior work on entity tracking establishes what models use: bindings are resolved at query time rather than stored as explicit latent state. We ask what they write at the operation span and how it is accessed. We split a forward pass into a frozen writer and a reader: the writer's cache is recomputed without gradients, while the reader sees only the instruction and operation tokens, with all state descriptions hidden, and is trained

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