Testing Transformer Learnability on the Arithmetic Sequence of Rooted Trees
Artificial Intelligence
2025-12-02 v1 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Mathematical Physics
math.MP
Number Theory
Abstract
We study whether a Large Language Model can learn the deterministic sequence of trees generated by the iterated prime factorization of the natural numbers. Each integer is mapped into a rooted planar tree and the resulting sequence defines an arithmetic text with measurable statistical structure. A transformer network (the GPT-2 architecture) is trained from scratch on the first elements to subsequently test its predictive ability under next-word and masked-word prediction tasks. Our results show that the model partially learns the internal grammar of , capturing non-trivial regularities and correlations. This suggests that learnability may extend beyond empirical data to the very structure of arithmetic.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.01870,
title = {Testing Transformer Learnability on the Arithmetic Sequence of Rooted Trees},
author = {Alessandro Breccia and Federica Gerace and Marco Lippi and Gabriele Sicuro and Pierluigi Contucci},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.01870},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
21 pages, 8 figures