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Long-context modeling presents a significant challenge for transformer-based large language models (LLMs) due to the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism and issues with length extrapolation caused by pretraining exclusively…
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…
Generalizing to longer sentences is important for recent Transformer-based language models. Besides algorithms manipulating explicit position features, the success of Transformers without position encodings (NoPE) provides a new way to…
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,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit positional bias, struggling to utilize information from the middle or end of long contexts. Our study explores LLMs' long-context reasoning by probing their hidden representations. We find that while…
Length generalization, defined as the ability to extrapolate from shorter training sequences to longer test ones, is a significant challenge for language models. This issue persists even with large-scale Transformers handling relatively…
It is a widely known issue that Transformers, when trained on shorter sequences, fail to generalize robustly to longer ones at test time. This raises the question of whether Transformer models are real reasoning engines, despite their…
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…
The ability to extrapolate from short problem instances to longer ones is an important form of out-of-distribution generalization in reasoning tasks, and is crucial when learning from datasets where longer problem instances are rare. These…
Large language models exhibit surprising emergent generalization properties, yet also struggle on many simple reasoning tasks such as arithmetic and parity. This raises the question of if and when Transformer models can learn the true…
Large language models (LLMs) often fail to scale their performance on long-context tasks performance in line with the context lengths they support. This gap is commonly attributed to retrieval failures -- the models' inability to identify…
Large language models (LLMs) based on Transformer have been widely applied in the filed of natural language processing (NLP), demonstrating strong performance, particularly in handling short text tasks. However, when it comes to long…
While Transformers have shown remarkable success in natural language processing, their attention mechanism's large memory requirements have limited their ability to handle longer contexts. Prior approaches, such as recurrent memory or…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehending and analyzing lengthy sequential inputs, owing to their extensive context windows that allow processing millions of tokens in a single forward pass.…
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive performance and surprising emergent properties. However, their effectiveness remains limited by the fixed context window of the transformer architecture, posing challenges for…
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…
Whether language models can systematically generalize remains actively debated. Yet empirical performance is jointly shaped by multiple factors such as training data, training paradigms, and inference-time strategies, making failures…
A major challenge for transformers is generalizing to sequences longer than those observed during training. While previous works have empirically shown that transformers can either succeed or fail at length generalization depending on the…
The relationship between memorization and generalization in large language models (LLMs) remains an open area of research, with growing evidence that the two are deeply intertwined. In this work, we investigate this relationship by…
Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence architectures, while achieving state-of-the-art results on a large number of NLP tasks, can still suffer from overfitting during training. In practice, this is usually countered either by applying…