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Related papers: Algorithmic Capabilities of Random Transformers

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Humans are highly effective at utilizing prior knowledge to adapt to novel tasks, a capability that standard machine learning models struggle to replicate due to their reliance on task-specific training. Meta-learning overcomes this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Björn Hoppmann , Christoph Scholz

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Xingwu Chen , Difan Zou

In-context learning is a remarkable capability of transformers, referring to their ability to adapt to specific tasks based on a short history or context. Previous research has found that task-specific information is locally encoded within…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Liu Yang , Ziqian Lin , Kangwook Lee , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Robert Nowak

Activation functions can have a significant impact on reducing the topological complexity of input data and therefore improve the performance of the model. Selecting a suitable activation function is an essential step in neural model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-15 Haishuo Fang , Ji-Ung Lee , Nafise Sadat Moosavi , Iryna Gurevych

Large Transformer models have achieved impressive performance in many natural language tasks. In particular, Transformer based language models have been shown to have great capabilities in encoding factual knowledge in their vast amount of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Chen Zhu , Ankit Singh Rawat , Manzil Zaheer , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Daliang Li , Felix Yu , Sanjiv Kumar

We investigate the capacity of transformers to learn algorithms involving their context while solely being trained using next token prediction. We set up Markov chains with random transition matrices and we train transformers to predict the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Simon Lepage , Jeremie Mary , David Picard

Transformers, as the fundamental deep learning architecture, have demonstrated great capability in reasoning. This paper studies the generalizable first-order logical reasoning ability of transformers with their parameterized knowledge and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Tianshi Zheng , Jiazheng Wang , Zihao Wang , Jiaxin Bai , Hang Yin , Zheye Deng , Yangqiu Song , Jianxin Li

While the exploration for embodied AI has spanned multiple decades, it remains a persistent challenge to endow agents with human-level intelligence, including perception, learning, reasoning, decision-making, control, and generalization…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Zhiyuan Xu , Kun Wu , Junjie Wen , Jinming Li , Ning Liu , Zhengping Che , Jian Tang

Through many recent successes in simulation, model-free reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising approach to solving continuous control robotic tasks. The research community is now able to reproduce, analyze and build quickly on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-21 A. Rupam Mahmood , Dmytro Korenkevych , Gautham Vasan , William Ma , James Bergstra

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…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Mikhail Burtsev

In this work, a neural network is trained to replicate the code that trains it using only its own output as input. A paradigm for evolutionary self-replication in neural programs is introduced, where program parameters are mutated, and the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-10-06 Samuel Schmidgall

Fine-tuning pre-trained transformers is a powerful technique for enhancing the performance of base models on specific tasks. From early applications in models like BERT to fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), this approach has been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Suneel Nadipalli

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan , Karren Yang , Mikhail Belkin , Caroline Uhler

Increase in data, size, or compute can lead to sudden learning of specific capabilities by a neural network -- a phenomenon often called "emergence''. Beyond scientific understanding, establishing the causal factors underlying such emergent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Kyogo Kawaguchi , Robert P. Dick , Hidenori Tanaka

Large language models like GPT-4 exhibit emergent capabilities across general-purpose tasks, such as basic arithmetic, when trained on extensive text data, even though these tasks are not explicitly encoded by the unsupervised, next-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-10 Nayoung Lee , Kartik Sreenivasan , Jason D. Lee , Kangwook Lee , Dimitris Papailiopoulos

There is a growing interest in the ability of neural networks to execute algorithmic tasks (e.g., arithmetic, summary statistics, and sorting). The goal of this work is to better understand the role of attention in Transformers for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Artur Back de Luca , George Giapitzakis , Shenghao Yang , Petar Veličković , Kimon Fountoulakis

Transferring knowledge from one neural network to another has been shown to be helpful for learning tasks with few training examples. Prevailing fine-tuning methods could potentially contaminate pre-trained features by comparably high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-15 Farshid Varno , Behrouz Haji Soleimani , Marzie Saghayi , Lisa Di Jorio , Stan Matwin

Neural language models learn word representations, or embeddings, that capture rich linguistic and conceptual information. Here we investigate the embeddings learned by neural machine translation models, a recently-developed class of neural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2015-04-06 Felix Hill , Kyunghyun Cho , Sebastien Jean , Coline Devin , Yoshua Bengio

We investigate the capability of a transformer pretrained on natural language to generalize to other modalities with minimal finetuning -- in particular, without finetuning of the self-attention and feedforward layers of the residual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Kevin Lu , Aditya Grover , Pieter Abbeel , Igor Mordatch

Robots are increasingly entering human-interactive scenarios that require understanding of quantity. How intelligent systems acquire abstract numerical concepts from sensorimotor experience remains a fundamental challenge in cognitive…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Zhegong Shangguan , Alessandro Di Nuovo , Angelo Cangelosi