Related papers: Why are Sensitive Functions Hard for Transformers?
Transformers achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness across many tasks, but an understanding of their inductive biases and how those biases differ from other neural network architectures remains elusive. In this work, we identify…
Despite the widespread success of Transformers on NLP tasks, recent works have found that they struggle to model several formal languages when compared to recurrent models. This raises the question of why Transformers perform well in…
Noise is ubiquitous in data used to train large language models, but it is not well understood whether these models are able to correctly generalize to inputs generated without noise. Here, we study noise-robust learning: are transformers…
Despite the fact that Transformers perform well in NLP tasks, recent studies suggest that self-attention is theoretically limited in learning even some regular and context-free languages. These findings motivated us to think about their…
Despite the empirical success of prompt tuning in adapting pretrained language models to new tasks, theoretical analyses of its capabilities remain limited. Existing theoretical work primarily addresses universal approximation properties,…
The ability to learn and predict simple functions is a key aspect of human intelligence. Recent works have started to explore this ability using transformer architectures, however it remains unclear whether this is sufficient to…
Transformers serve as the foundational architecture for large language and video generation models, such as GPT, BERT, SORA and their successors. Empirical studies have demonstrated that real-world data and learning tasks exhibit…
The remarkable capability of over-parameterised neural networks to generalise effectively has been explained by invoking a ``simplicity bias'': neural networks prevent overfitting by initially learning simple classifiers before progressing…
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…
Our paper challenges claims from prior research that transformer-based models, when learning in context, implicitly implement standard learning algorithms. We present empirical evidence inconsistent with this view and provide a mathematical…
We study inductive bias in Transformers in the infinitely over-parameterized Gaussian process limit and argue transformers tend to be biased towards more permutation symmetric functions in sequence space. We show that the representation…
Transformers have become pivotal in Natural Language Processing, demonstrating remarkable success in applications like Machine Translation and Summarization. Given their widespread adoption, several works have attempted to analyze the…
Transformers have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, yet their performance on compositional problems remains a subject of debate. In this study, we investigate the internal mechanisms underlying Transformers'…
Transformers are crucial across many AI fields, such as large language models, computer vision, and reinforcement learning. This prominence stems from the architecture's perceived universality and scalability compared to alternatives. This…
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…
Transformers struggle with length generalisation, displaying poor performance even on basic tasks. We test whether these limitations can be explained through two key failures of the self-attention mechanism. The first is the inability to…
Understanding what neural architectures can and cannot compute is a central challenge in the theory of AI. One of the fundamental problems in this context is the PARITY task, which asks whether the number of 1s in a binary input sequence is…
Efficient training and inference algorithms, such as low-rank adaption and model pruning, have shown impressive performance for learning Transformer-based large foundation models. However, due to the technical challenges of the non-convex…
We study the capabilities of the transformer architecture with varying depth. Specifically, we designed a novel set of sequence learning tasks to systematically evaluate and comprehend how the depth of transformer affects its ability to…
Reasoning capability is essential to ensure the factual correctness of the responses of transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs), and robust reasoning about transitive relations is instrumental in many settings, such as causal…