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We investigate how embedding dimension affects the emergence of an internal "world model" in a transformer trained with reinforcement learning to perform bubble-sort-style adjacent swaps. Models achieve high accuracy even with very small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Brady Bhalla , Honglu Fan , Nancy Chen , Tony Yue YU

This paper investigates approximation-theoretic aspects of the in-context learning capability of the transformers in representing a family of noisy linear dynamical systems. Our first theoretical result establishes an upper bound on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Frank Cole , Yuxuan Zhao , Yulong Lu , Tianhao Zhang

While transformers have proven enormously successful in a range of tasks, their fundamental properties as models of computation are not well understood. This paper contributes to the study of the expressive capacity of transformers,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Lena Strobl , Dana Angluin , Robert Frank

Despite their nearly universal adoption for large language models, the internal workings of transformers are not well understood. We aim to better understand the impact of removing or reorganizing information throughout the layers of a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Qi Sun , Marc Pickett , Aakash Kumar Nain , Llion Jones

The transformer is a neural network component that can be used to learn useful representations of sequences or sets of data-points. The transformer has driven recent advances in natural language processing, computer vision, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Richard E. Turner

Transformers demonstrate impressive performance on a range of reasoning benchmarks. To evaluate the degree to which these abilities are a result of actual reasoning, existing work has focused on developing sophisticated benchmarks for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Jannik Brinkmann , Abhay Sheshadri , Victor Levoso , Paul Swoboda , Christian Bartelt

Transformer based models have shown remarkable capabilities in sequence learning across a wide range of tasks, often performing well on specific task by leveraging input-output examples. Despite their empirical success, a comprehensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Yifan Hao , Chenlu Ye , Chi Han , Tong Zhang

Transformer is a powerful architecture that achieves superior performance on various sequence learning tasks, including neural machine translation, language understanding, and sequence prediction. At the core of the Transformer is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai , Shaojie Bai , Makoto Yamada , Louis-Philippe Morency , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Much theoretical work has described the ability of transformers to represent formal languages. However, linking theoretical results to empirical performance is not straightforward due to the complex interplay between the architecture, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Anej Svete , Nadav Borenstein , Mike Zhou , Isabelle Augenstein , Ryan Cotterell

The growing capabilities of transformer models pave the way for solving increasingly complex NLP tasks. A key to supporting application-specific requirements is the ability to fine-tune. However, compiling a fine-tuning dataset tailored to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Solveig Helland , Elena Gavagnin , Alexandre de Spindler

Parameter sharing has proven to be a parameter-efficient approach. Previous work on Transformers has focused on sharing parameters in different layers, which can improve the performance of models with limited parameters by increasing model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Ye Lin , Mingxuan Wang , Zhexi Zhang , Xiaohui Wang , Tong Xiao , Jingbo Zhu

Transformers deliver outstanding performance across a wide range of tasks and are now a dominant backbone architecture for large language models (LLMs). Their task-solving performance is improved by increasing parameter size, as shown in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Hidetaka Kamigaito , Ying Zhang , Jingun Kwon , Katsuhiko Hayashi , Manabu Okumura , Taro Watanabe

We propose and evaluate a novel procedure for training multiple Transformers with tied parameters which compresses multiple models into one enabling the dynamic choice of the number of encoder and decoder layers during decoding. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-02-21 Raj Dabre , Raphael Rubino , Atsushi Fujita

Learning deeper models is usually a simple and effective approach to improve model performance, but deeper models have larger model parameters and are more difficult to train. To get a deeper model, simply stacking more layers of the model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-08-27 GuoLiang Li , Yiyang Li

Transformer-based pre-trained models with millions of parameters require large storage. Recent approaches tackle this shortcoming by training adapters, but these approaches still require a relatively large number of parameters. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Chin-Lun Fu , Zih-Ching Chen , Yun-Ru Lee , Hung-yi Lee

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

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

For years the model performance in machine learning obeyed a power-law relationship with the model size. For the consideration of parameter efficiency, recent studies focus on increasing model depth rather than width to achieve better…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Ye Lin , Shuhan Zhou , Yanyang Li , Anxiang Ma , Tong Xiao , Jingbo Zhu

Understanding Transformer-based models has attracted significant attention, as they lie at the heart of recent technological advances across machine learning. While most interpretability methods rely on running models over inputs, recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Guy Dar , Mor Geva , Ankit Gupta , Jonathan Berant

Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yu Huang , Yuan Cheng , Yingbin Liang