Persistence, Exposure, and Credit Routing in Linear Temporal Predictive Coding

Akira Tanase, Julian Gould, Jeffrey Seely

Temporal Predictive Coding (tPC) networks offer a layer-local alternative to backpropagation. For linear tPC, we show, by applying tools from cellular sheaf theory, that temporal credit assignment is a tug-of-war between spatial displacement and temporal errors, whose ratios are modulated by persistence and exposure operators $P$ and $Q$. Spatial inference therefore gives us the effective recurrent transition $F=PA$, whilst future credit is filtered by $P^\ast$. This creates a persistence--error tradeoff in spatial modes: under non-amplifying invariant recurrence, modes that preserve influence over long delays simultaneously fail to expose that influence strongly as temporal error. Recurrence can circumvent this via routing between persistent and exposed modes.