When 2D Tasks Meet 1D Serialization: On Serialization Friction in Structured Tasks 文章

arXiv:2604.27272v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the LLM era, many symbolic and structured problems are presented to models through 1D text serialization. Yet some such problems are natively two-dimensional: their relevant relations, such as row--column correspondence or spatial adjacency, are defined by position in a 2D layout rather than by sequential order. This raises a representational question: does preserving the same symbolic entries in a 1D sequence also preserve the relational structure needed for computation? We study this issue through the lens of serialization friction: the representational mismatch in which the same underlying task instances and entries are still present, but relations that depend on layout become implicit under 1D serialization. The study uses a controlled synthetic testbed of three tasks: matrix transpose, Conway's Game of Life, and LU decomposition.