Related papers: A Mechanistic Analysis of a Transformer Trained on…

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multi-step reasoning tasks. However, understandings of the underlying mechanisms by which they acquire these abilities through training remain limited, particularly from a…

Transformer-based language models have achieved significant success; however, their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque due to the complexity of non-linear interactions and high-dimensional operations. While previous studies have…

Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…

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…

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable performance in natural language processing and related domains, as they largely focus on sequential, autoregressive next-token prediction tasks. Yet, they struggle in logical reasoning, not…

Which transformer scaling regimes are able to perfectly solve different classes of algorithmic problems? While tremendous empirical advances have been attained by transformer-based neural networks, a theoretical understanding of their…

Transformer-based language models excel at both recall (retrieving memorized facts) and reasoning (performing multi-step inference), but whether these abilities rely on distinct internal mechanisms remains unclear. Distinguishing recall…

We investigate the mechanisms that arise when transformers are trained to solve arithmetic on sequences where tokens are variables whose meaning is determined only through their interactions in-context. While prior work has studied…

Recent work has shown that language models (LMs) have strong multi-step (i.e., procedural) reasoning capabilities. However, it is unclear whether LMs perform these tasks by cheating with answers memorized from pretraining corpus, or, via a…

Analogy is a central faculty of human intelligence, enabling abstract patterns discovered in one domain to be applied to another. Despite its central role in cognition, the mechanisms by which Transformers acquire and implement analogical…

Stepwise inference protocols, such as scratchpads and chain-of-thought, help language models solve complex problems by decomposing them into a sequence of simpler subproblems. Despite the significant gain in performance achieved via these…

This work provides the first theoretical analysis of training transformers to solve complex problems by recursively generating intermediate states, analogous to fine-tuning for chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. We consider training a…

We investigate the capabilities of transformer models on relational reasoning tasks. In these tasks, models are trained on a set of strings encoding abstract relations, and are then tested out-of-distribution on data that contains symbols…

Algorithmic reasoning requires capabilities which are most naturally understood through recurrent models of computation, like the Turing machine. However, Transformer models, while lacking recurrence, are able to perform such reasoning…

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…

Reasoning-oriented large language models (RLMs) achieve strong gains on tasks such as mathematics and coding by generating explicit intermediate reasoning. However, their impact on machine translation (MT) remains underexplored. We…

Standard Transformers have a fixed computational depth, fundamentally limiting their ability to generalize to tasks requiring variable-depth reasoning, such as multi-hop graph traversal or nested logic. We propose a depth-recurrent…

Transformers generate valid and diverse chemical structures, but little is known about the mechanisms that enable these models to capture the rules of molecular representation. We present a mechanistic analysis of autoregressive…

Neural networks have in recent years shown promise for helping software engineers write programs and even formally verify them. While semantic information plays a crucial part in these processes, it remains unclear to what degree popular…

Transformers trained on huge text corpora exhibit a remarkable set of capabilities, e.g., performing basic arithmetic. Given the inherent compositional nature of language, one can expect the model to learn to compose these capabilities,…