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Trained transformer models have been found to implement interpretable procedures for tasks like arithmetic and associative recall, but little is understood about how the circuits that implement these procedures originate during training. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Ziqian Zhong , Jacob Andreas

Transformers have recently been shown to be capable of reliably performing logical reasoning over facts and rules expressed in natural language, but abductive reasoning - inference to the best explanation of an unexpected observation - has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Nathan Young , Qiming Bao , Joshua Bensemann , Michael Witbrock

Analogical reasoning is a hallmark of human intelligence, enabling us to solve new problems by transferring knowledge from one situation to another. Yet, developing artificial intelligence systems capable of robust human-like analogical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Philipp Hellwig , Willem Zuidema , Claire E. Stevenson , Martha Lewis

The importance of building neural networks that can learn to reason has been well recognized in the neuro-symbolic community. In this paper, we apply neural pointer networks for conducting reasoning over symbolic knowledge bases. In doing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Monireh Ebrahimi , Aaron Eberhart , Pascal Hitzler

Large language models have recently shown promising progress in mathematical reasoning when fine-tuned with human-generated sequences walking through a sequence of solution steps. However, the solution sequences are not formally structured…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Andrew J. Nam , Mengye Ren , Chelsea Finn , James L. McClelland

We investigate whether transformers use their depth adaptively across tasks of increasing difficulty. Using a controlled multi-hop relational reasoning task based on family stories, where difficulty is determined by the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Alicia Curth , Rachel Lawrence , Sushrut Karmalkar , Niranjani Prasad

To improve the explainability of leading Transformer networks used in NLP, it is important to tease apart genuine symbolic rules from merely associative input-output patterns. However, we identify several inconsistencies in how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Tommi Gröndahl , Yujia Guo , N. Asokan

Transformers have significantly impacted domains like natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics, where they improve performance compared to other neural networks. This survey explores how transformers are used in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Pranav Agarwal , Aamer Abdul Rahman , Pierre-Luc St-Charles , Simon J. D. Prince , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

In recent years, large pretrained models have been used in dialogue systems to improve successful task completion rates. However, lack of reasoning capabilities of dialogue platforms make it difficult to provide relevant and fluent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Sajjad Beygi , Maryam Fazel-Zarandi , Alessandra Cervone , Prakash Krishnan , Siddhartha Reddy Jonnalagadda

Neural networks have succeeded in many reasoning tasks. Empirically, these tasks require specialized network structures, e.g., Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) perform well on many such tasks, but less structured networks fail. Theoretically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Keyulu Xu , Jingling Li , Mozhi Zhang , Simon S. Du , Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi , Stefanie Jegelka

Many recent studies have found evidence for emergent reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), but debate persists concerning the robustness of these capabilities, and the extent to which they depend on structured reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Yukang Yang , Declan Campbell , Kaixuan Huang , Mengdi Wang , Jonathan Cohen , Taylor Webb

The notion of equality (identity) is simple and ubiquitous, making it a key case study for broader questions about the representations supporting abstract relational reasoning. Previous work suggested that neural networks were not suitable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Atticus Geiger , Alexandra Carstensen , Michael C. Frank , Christopher Potts

Several recent works demonstrate that transformers can implement algorithms like gradient descent. By a careful construction of weights, these works show that multiple layers of transformers are expressive enough to simulate iterations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Kwangjun Ahn , Xiang Cheng , Hadi Daneshmand , Suvrit Sra

Transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities, but the mechanisms underlying relational reasoning remain poorly understood. We investigate how transformers perform \textit{transitive inference}, a classic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jesse Geerts , Andrew Liu , Stephanie Chan , Claudia Clopath , Kimberly Stachenfeld

Many neural network architectures are known to be Turing Complete, and can thus, in principle implement arbitrary algorithms. However, Transformers are unique in that they can implement gradient-based learning algorithms under simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Xiang Cheng , Yuxin Chen , Suvrit Sra

Large Language Models demonstrate remarkable mathematical capabilities but at the same time struggle with abstract reasoning and planning. In this study, we explore whether Transformers can learn to abstract and generalize the rules…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Mikhail Burtsev

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive abilities in symbol processing through in-context learning (ICL). This success flies in the face of decades of critiques asserting that artificial neural networks cannot master…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Paul Smolensky , Roland Fernandez , Zhenghao Herbert Zhou , Mattia Opper , Adam Davies , Jianfeng Gao

Transformers trained on natural language data have been shown to learn its hierarchical structure and generalize to sentences with unseen syntactic structures without explicitly encoding any structural bias. In this work, we investigate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Kabir Ahuja , Vidhisha Balachandran , Madhur Panwar , Tianxing He , Noah A. Smith , Navin Goyal , Yulia Tsvetkov

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the capacity to store and recall facts. Through experimentation with open-source models, we observe that this ability to retrieve facts can be easily manipulated by changing contexts, even without altering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Yibo Jiang , Goutham Rajendran , Pradeep Ravikumar , Bryon Aragam

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in situations where human values are at stake, such as decision-making tasks that involve reasoning when performed by humans. We investigate the so-called reasoning capabilities of LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Nathaniël de Leeuw , Marceau Nahon , Mathis Reymond , Raja Chatila , Mehdi Khamassi