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Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have displayed remarkable creative prowess and emergence capabilities. Existing empirical studies have revealed a strong connection between these LLMs' impressive emergence abilities and their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Dake Bu , Wei Huang , Andi Han , Atsushi Nitanda , Taiji Suzuki , Qingfu Zhang , Hau-San Wong

One way to interpret the reasoning power of transformer-based language models is to describe the types of logical rules they can resolve over some input text. Recently, Chiang et al. (2023) showed that finite-precision transformers can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 William Merrill , Ashish Sabharwal

Autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in language understanding and generation. However, their application in text embedding tasks has been relatively slow, along with the analysis of their semantic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Zhaoxin Feng , Jianfei Ma , Emmanuele Chersoni , Xiaojing Zhao , Xiaoyi Bao

We explore deep autoregressive Transformer models in language modeling for speech recognition. We focus on two aspects. First, we revisit Transformer model configurations specifically for language modeling. We show that well configured…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-25 Kazuki Irie , Albert Zeyer , Ralf Schlüter , Hermann Ney

We give a novel logical characterization of encoder-decoder transformers, the foundational architecture for LLMs that also sees use in various settings that benefit from cross-attention. We study such transformers over text in the practical…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Veeti Ahvonen , Damian Heiman , Antti Kuusisto , Miguel Moreno , Matias Selin

Large Language Models (LLMs) face efficiency bottlenecks due to the quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism when processing long contexts. Sparse attention methods offer a promising solution, but existing approaches often suffer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Lida Chen , Dong Xu , Chenxin An , Xintao Wang , Yikai Zhang , Jiangjie Chen , Zujie Liang , Feng Wei , Jiaqing Liang , Yanghua Xiao , Wei Wang

Transformers have supplanted recurrent models in a large number of NLP tasks. However, the differences in their abilities to model different syntactic properties remain largely unknown. Past works suggest that LSTMs generalize very well on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-09 Satwik Bhattamishra , Kabir Ahuja , Navin Goyal

We investigate the expressive power of state space models (SSM), which have recently emerged as a potential alternative to transformer architectures in large language models. Building on recent work, we analyse SSM expressiveness through…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Eric Alsmann , Lowejatan Noori , Martin Lange

Transformers are emerging as the new workhorse of NLP, showing great success across tasks. Unlike LSTMs, transformers process input sequences entirely through self-attention. Previous work has suggested that the computational capabilities…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-28 Michael Hahn

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in pervasive computing due to their versatility and strong performance. However, despite their ubiquitous use, the exact mechanisms underlying their outstanding performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Alhassan Abdelhalim , Janick Edinger , Sören Laue , Michaela Regneri

Transformer architecture has become ubiquitous in the natural language processing field. To interpret the Transformer-based models, their attention patterns have been extensively analyzed. However, the Transformer architecture is not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Goro Kobayashi , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Sho Yokoi , Kentaro Inui

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across many natural language processing tasks. Nonetheless, their quadratic computational and memory requirements, particularly in self-attention layers, pose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Fabien Furfaro

Large language models (LLMs) based on transformer architectures are typically described through collections of architectural components and training procedures, obscuring their underlying computational structure. This review article…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Vikram Krishnamurthy

The powerful modeling capabilities of all-attention-based transformer architectures often cause overfitting and - for natural language processing tasks - lead to an implicitly learned internal language model in the autoregressive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Timo Lohrenz , Björn Möller , Zhengyang Li , Tim Fingscheidt

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed on complex reasoning tasks, yet little is known about their ability to internally evaluate problem difficulty, which is an essential capability for adaptive reasoning and efficient…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sunbowen Lee , Qingyu Yin , Chak Tou Leong , Jialiang Zhang , Yicheng Gong , Shiwen Ni , Min Yang , Xiaoyu Shen

Attention matrices are fundamental to transformer research, supporting a broad range of applications including interpretability, visualization, manipulation, and distillation. Yet, most existing analyses focus on individual attention heads…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Ido Andrew Atad , Itamar Zimerman , Shahar Katz , Lior Wolf

This note is a survey of various results on the capabilities of unique hard attention transformers encoders (UHATs) to recognize formal languages. We distinguish between masked vs. non-masked, finite vs. infinite image and general vs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Leonid Ryvkin

Large Language Models are prone to biased predictions and hallucinations, underlining the paramount importance of understanding their model-internal reasoning process. However, achieving faithful attributions for the entirety of a black-box…

Previous research has explored the computational expressivity of Transformer models in simulating Boolean circuits or Turing machines. However, the learnability of these simulators from observational data has remained an open question. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Morris Yau , Ekin Akyürek , Jiayuan Mao , Joshua B. Tenenbaum , Stefanie Jegelka , Jacob Andreas

The Transformer translation model is based on the multi-head attention mechanism, which can be parallelized easily. The multi-head attention network performs the scaled dot-product attention function in parallel, empowering the model by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-13 Hongfei Xu , Qiuhui Liu , Josef van Genabith , Deyi Xiong