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Machine translation has seen rapid progress with the advent of Transformer-based models. These models have no explicit linguistic structure built into them, yet they may still implicitly learn structured relationships by attending to…

Alongside the continuous process of improving AI performance through the development of more sophisticated models, researchers have also focused their attention to the emerging concept of data-centric AI, which emphasizes the important role…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Jingjing Xu , Caesar Wu , Yuan-Fang Li , Gregoire Danoy , Pascal Bouvry

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have been applied in diverse areas such as knowledge bases, human interfaces, and dynamic agents, and marking a stride towards achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yunpeng Huang , Jingwei Xu , Junyu Lai , Zixu Jiang , Taolue Chen , Zenan Li , Yuan Yao , Xiaoxing Ma , Lijuan Yang , Hao Chen , Shupeng Li , Penghao Zhao

In this article we prove that the general transformer neural model undergirding modern large language models (LLMs) is Turing complete under reasonable assumptions. This is the first work to directly address the Turing completeness of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Jesse Roberts

Transformers play a central role in the inner workings of large language models. We develop a mathematical framework for analyzing Transformers based on their interpretation as interacting particle systems, which reveals that clusters…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Borjan Geshkovski , Cyril Letrouit , Yury Polyanskiy , Philippe Rigollet

We conduct a systematic study of the approximation properties of Transformer for sequence modeling with long, sparse and complicated memory. We investigate the mechanisms through which different components of Transformer, such as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Mingze Wang , Weinan E

Transformer networks excel in scientific applications. We explore two scenarios in ultra-high-energy cosmic ray simulations to examine what these network architectures learn. First, we investigate the trained positional encodings in air…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2026-04-14 Martin Erdmann , Niklas Langner , Josina Schulte , Dominik Wirtz

Transformers have dominated the field of natural language processing, and recently impacted the computer vision area. In the field of medical image analysis, Transformers have also been successfully applied to full-stack clinical…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-08-22 Kelei He , Chen Gan , Zhuoyuan Li , Islem Rekik , Zihao Yin , Wen Ji , Yang Gao , Qian Wang , Junfeng Zhang , Dinggang Shen

Because language is creative, any reasonable language model must generalize, deciding what to say in novel contexts by using information from similar contexts. But what about contexts that are not novel but merely infrequent? In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Vsevolod Kapatsinski

In-context learning, a capability that enables a model to learn from input examples on the fly without necessitating weight updates, is a defining characteristic of large language models. In this work, we follow the setting proposed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Kartik Ahuja , David Lopez-Paz

Natural language processing (NLP) made an impressive jump with the introduction of Transformers. ChatGPT is one of the most famous examples, changing the perception of the possibilities of AI even outside the research community. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Silas Alberti , Niclas Dern , Laura Thesing , Gitta Kutyniok

Language Generation Models produce words based on the previous context. Although existing methods offer input attributions as explanations for a model's prediction, it is still unclear how prior words affect the model's decision throughout…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Javier Ferrando , Gerard I. Gállego , Ioannis Tsiamas , Marta R. Costa-jussà

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized the field of sequence modeling and underpins the recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs). However, a comprehensive mathematical theory that explains its structure and operations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Xue-Cheng Tai , Hao Liu , Lingfeng Li , Raymond H. Chan

Length generalization, defined as the ability to extrapolate from shorter training sequences to longer test ones, is a significant challenge for language models. This issue persists even with large-scale Transformers handling relatively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Yongchao Zhou , Uri Alon , Xinyun Chen , Xuezhi Wang , Rishabh Agarwal , Denny Zhou

Despite the widespread adoption of Transformer models for NLP tasks, the expressive power of these models is not well-understood. In this paper, we establish that Transformer models are universal approximators of continuous permutation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Chulhee Yun , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Ankit Singh Rawat , Sashank J. Reddi , Sanjiv Kumar

Transformers are a type of neural network that have demonstrated remarkable performance across various domains, particularly in natural language processing tasks. Motivated by this success, research on the theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Naoki Takeshita , Masaaki Imaizumi

Large language models exhibit surprising emergent generalization properties, yet also struggle on many simple reasoning tasks such as arithmetic and parity. This raises the question of if and when Transformer models can learn the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Hattie Zhou , Arwen Bradley , Etai Littwin , Noam Razin , Omid Saremi , Josh Susskind , Samy Bengio , Preetum Nakkiran

We investigate the capabilities of transformer models on relational reasoning tasks. In these tasks, models are trained on a set of strings encoding abstract relations, and are then tested out-of-distribution on data that contains symbols…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Enric Boix-Adsera , Omid Saremi , Emmanuel Abbe , Samy Bengio , Etai Littwin , Joshua Susskind

Transformers have proven highly effective across various applications, especially in handling sequential data such as natural languages and time series. However, transformer models often lack clear interpretability, and the success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Wei Shi , Yuan Cao

The remarkable performance of the Transformer architecture in natural language processing has recently also triggered broad interest in Computer Vision. Among other merits, Transformers are witnessed as capable of learning long-range…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Reza Azad , Amirhossein Kazerouni , Moein Heidari , Ehsan Khodapanah Aghdam , Amirali Molaei , Yiwei Jia , Abin Jose , Rijo Roy , Dorit Merhof