Related papers: Unveiling Transformers with LEGO: a synthetic reas…
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing language model's reasoning capabilities. However, generating long and correct CoT trajectories is challenging. Recent studies have demonstrated that Looped…
Imitation learning has been commonly applied to solve different tasks in isolation. This usually requires either careful feature engineering, or a significant number of samples. This is far from what we desire: ideally, robots should be…
Modern language models rely on the transformer architecture and attention mechanism to perform language understanding and text generation. In this work, we study learning a 1-layer self-attention model from a set of prompts and associated…
Chain-of-thought reasoning and scratchpads have emerged as critical tools for enhancing the computational capabilities of transformers. While theoretical results show that polynomial-length scratchpads can extend transformers' expressivity…
We study length generalization in sequence models on a composite problem involving both state tracking and associative recall. Prior work finds that recurrent networks handle state tracking well but struggle with recall, whereas…
Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has been proposed as a method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. While these reasoning traces or Chain of Thoughts (CoTs)…
Attention is a cornerstone of human cognition that facilitates the efficient extraction of information in everyday life. Recent developments in artificial intelligence like the Transformer architecture also incorporate the idea of attention…
Transformer-based deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance across numerous language and vision tasks. While the self-attention mechanism, a core component of transformers, has proven capable of handling complex data…
Modern large language models (LLMs) excel at tasks that require storing and retrieving knowledge, such as factual recall and question answering. Transformers are central to this capability because they can encode information during training…
Learned self-attention functions in state-of-the-art NLP models often correlate with human attention. We investigate whether self-attention in large-scale pre-trained language models is as predictive of human eye fixation patterns during…
Alignment training has tradeoffs: it helps language models (LMs) gain in reasoning and instruction following but might lose out on skills such as creativity and calibration, where unaligned base models are better at. We aim to make the best…
Standard Transformers excel at semantic modeling but struggle with rigid sequential logic and state tracking. Theoretical work establishes that self-attention is limited to $\AC^0$ (under hard attention) or $\TC^0$ (under soft attention),…
The transformer architecture, which processes sequences of input tokens to produce outputs for query tokens, has revolutionized numerous areas of machine learning. A defining feature of transformers is their ability to perform previously…
Transformer architectures have revolutionized artificial intelligence (AI) through their attention mechanisms, yet the computational principles underlying their success remain opaque. We present a novel theoretical framework that…
We consider the problem of completing a set of $n$ tasks with a human-robot team using minimum effort. In many domains, teaching a robot to be fully autonomous can be counterproductive if there are finitely many tasks to be done. Rather,…
Although transformer-based models have shown exceptional empirical performance, the fundamental principles governing their training dynamics are inadequately characterized beyond configuration-specific studies. Inspired by empirical…
Latent reasoning represents a new development in Transformer language models that has shown potential in compressing reasoning lengths compared to chain-of-thought reasoning. By directly passing the information-rich previous final latent…
Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success across language, vision, and multimodal tasks, and there is growing demand for them to address in-context compositional learning tasks. In these tasks, models solve the target…
Most state-of-the-art techniques for Language Models (LMs) today rely on transformer-based architectures and their ubiquitous attention mechanism. However, the exponential growth in computational requirements with longer input sequences…
Generative models are now used to create a variety of high-quality digital artifacts. Yet their use in designing physical objects has received far less attention. In this paper, we advocate for the construction toy, LEGO, as a platform for…