Related papers: Initialization is Critical to Whether Transformers…

In-context learning (ICL) is a key building block of modern large language models, yet its theoretical mechanisms remain poorly understood. It is particularly mysterious how ICL operates in real-world applications where tasks have a common…

Large Language Models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of tasks. Despite its empirical success, the tasks and model scales at which reasoning becomes effective, as well as its…

Transformer based language models exhibit intelligent behaviors such as understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, acquiring knowledge, reasoning, planning, reflecting and using tools. This paper explores how their underlying…

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…

Gradient-based meta-learning has proven to be highly effective at learning model initializations, representations, and update rules that allow fast adaptation from a few samples. The core idea behind these approaches is to use fast…

How language models process complex input that requires multiple steps of inference is not well understood. Previous research has shown that information about intermediate values of these inputs can be extracted from the activations of the…

Despite the empirical success of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) in fine-tuning pre-trained models, there is little theoretical understanding of how first-order methods with carefully crafted initialization adapt models to new tasks. In this…

Parameter-efficient continual learning aims to adapt pre-trained models to sequential tasks without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Most existing approaches treat continual learning as avoiding interference with past updates,…

Understanding the learning process and the embedded computation in transformers is becoming a central goal for the development of interpretable AI. In the present study, we introduce a hierarchical filtering procedure for data models of…

Machine learning models such as Transformers or LSTMs struggle with tasks that are compositional in nature such as those involving reasoning/inference. Although many datasets exist to evaluate compositional generalization, when it comes to…

Inherent limitations of contemporary machine learning systems in crucial areas -- importantly in continual learning, information reuse, comprehensibility, and integration with deliberate behavior -- are receiving increasing attention. To…

The ability of deep neural networks to generalize well in the overparameterized regime has become a subject of significant research interest. We show that overparameterized autoencoders exhibit memorization, a form of inductive bias that…

Large language models (LLMs) excel on a variety of reasoning benchmarks, but previous studies suggest they sometimes struggle to generalize to unseen questions, potentially due to over-reliance on memorized training examples. However, the…

Providing invariances in a given learning task conveys a key inductive bias that can lead to sample-efficient learning and good generalisation, if correctly specified. However, the ideal invariances for many problems of interest are often…

Recent years have seen significant advancements in foundation models through generative pre-training, yet algorithmic innovation in this space has largely stagnated around autoregressive models for discrete signals and diffusion models for…

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…

Reasoning is a core capability of large language models, yet how multi-step reasoning is learned and executed remains unclear. We study this question in a controlled cellular-automata (1dCA) framework that excludes memorisation by using…

Imitation learning suffers from causal confusion. This phenomenon occurs when learned policies attend to features that do not causally influence the expert actions but are instead spuriously correlated. Causally confused agents produce low…

We investigate the robustness of Large Language Models (LLMs) to structural interventions by deleting and swapping adjacent layers during inference. Surprisingly, models retain 72-95% of their original top-1 prediction accuracy without any…

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…