Anatomy of Associative Recall in Fixed-State Recurrences: A Matched-State Decomposition, an Interference Wall, and a Curriculum That Breaks It

Fixed-state recurrences--linear attention and state-space models--are reported to lag behind attention on associative recall, but whole-architecture comparisons cannot say which ingredient is responsible. We decompose masked multi-query recall at a fixed state budget along three single-knob axes: a