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Transformer-based models excel in various tasks but their generalization capabilities, especially in arithmetic reasoning, remain incompletely understood. Arithmetic tasks provide a controlled framework to explore these capabilities, yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Xingcheng Xu , Zibo Zhao , Haipeng Zhang , Yanqing Yang

We examine how transformers cope with two challenges: learning basic integer arithmetic, and generalizing to longer sequences than seen during training. We find that relative position embeddings enable length generalization for simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Samy Jelassi , Stéphane d'Ascoli , Carles Domingo-Enrich , Yuhuai Wu , Yuanzhi Li , François Charton

Transformers have impressive generalization capabilities on tasks with a fixed context length. However, they fail to generalize to sequences of arbitrary length, even for seemingly simple tasks such as duplicating a string. Moreover, simply…

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

A major challenge for transformers is generalizing to sequences longer than those observed during training. While previous works have empirically shown that transformers can either succeed or fail at length generalization depending on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Xinting Huang , Andy Yang , Satwik Bhattamishra , Yash Sarrof , Andreas Krebs , Hattie Zhou , Preetum Nakkiran , Michael Hahn

Transformer language models have demonstrated impressive generalization capabilities in natural language domains, yet we lack a fine-grained understanding of how such generalization arises. In this paper, we investigate length…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Ziyang Cai , Nayoung Lee , Avi Schwarzschild , Samet Oymak , Dimitris Papailiopoulos

Training large language models to predict beyond their training context lengths has drawn much attention in recent years, yet the principles driving such behavior of length generalization remain underexplored. We propose a new theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Noah Golowich , Samy Jelassi , David Brandfonbrener , Sham M. Kakade , Eran Malach

The ability to extrapolate from short problem instances to longer ones is an important form of out-of-distribution generalization in reasoning tasks, and is crucial when learning from datasets where longer problem instances are rare. These…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Cem Anil , Yuhuai Wu , Anders Andreassen , Aitor Lewkowycz , Vedant Misra , Vinay Ramasesh , Ambrose Slone , Guy Gur-Ari , Ethan Dyer , Behnam Neyshabur

Transformers often struggle with length generalization, meaning they fail to generalize to sequences longer than those encountered during training. While arithmetic tasks are commonly used to study length generalization, certain tasks are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Hanseul Cho , Jaeyoung Cha , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Chulhee Yun

It is a widely known issue that Transformers, when trained on shorter sequences, fail to generalize robustly to longer ones at test time. This raises the question of whether Transformer models are real reasoning engines, despite their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Ruining Li , Gabrijel Boduljak , Jensen , Zhou

We study the problem of length generalization (LG) in transformers: the ability of a model trained on shorter sequences to maintain performance when evaluated on much longer, previously unseen inputs. Prior work by Huang et al. (2025)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Zachary Izzo , Eshaan Nichani , Jason D. Lee

Length generalization, the ability to solve problems longer than those seen during training, remains a critical challenge for large language models (LLMs). Previous work modifies positional encodings (PEs) and data formats to improve length…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Yi Hu , Shijia Kang , Haotong Yang , Haotian Xu , Muhan Zhang

Length generalization refers to the ability to extrapolate from short training sequences to long test sequences and is a challenge for current large language models. While prior work has proposed some architecture or data format changes to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Kaiying Hou , David Brandfonbrener , Sham Kakade , Samy Jelassi , Eran Malach

Length Generalization is the essential capacity of autonomous agents to perform tasks in longer contexts than those encountered during training. To systematically study this feat, we test how well models can approximate the next token…

Large language models often struggle with length generalization and solving complex problem instances beyond their training distribution. We present a self-improvement approach where models iteratively generate and learn from their own…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Nayoung Lee , Ziyang Cai , Avi Schwarzschild , Kangwook Lee , Dimitris Papailiopoulos

Transformer network architecture has proven effective in speech enhancement. However, as its core module, self-attention suffers from quadratic complexity, making it infeasible for training on long speech utterances. In practical scenarios,…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-10 Qiquan Zhang , Hongxu Zhu , Xinyuan Qian , Eliathamby Ambikairajah , Haizhou Li

Recent work has shown that Transformers trained from scratch can successfully solve various arithmetic and algorithmic tasks, such as adding numbers and computing parity. While these Transformers generalize well on unseen inputs of the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Ying Fan , Yilun Du , Kannan Ramchandran , Kangwook Lee

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Buu Phan , Reza Ebrahimi , Sanjay Haresh , Roland Memisevic

Transformers have theoretical limitations in modeling certain sequence-to-sequence tasks, yet it remains largely unclear if these limitations play a role in large-scale pretrained LLMs, or whether LLMs might effectively overcome these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Mayank Jobanputra , Yana Veitsman , Yash Sarrof , Aleksandra Bakalova , Vera Demberg , Ellie Pavlick , Michael Hahn

Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence architectures, while achieving state-of-the-art results on a large number of NLP tasks, can still suffer from overfitting during training. In practice, this is usually countered either by applying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Dušan Variš , Ondřej Bojar
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