Related papers: Are Transformers Able to Reason by Connecting Sepa…

Transformers can under some circumstances generalize to novel problem instances whose constituent parts might have been encountered during training, but whose compositions have not. What mechanisms underlie this ability for compositional…

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…

Pretraining on large, semantically rich datasets is key for developing language models. Surprisingly, recent studies have shown that even synthetic data, generated procedurally through simple semantic-free algorithms, can yield some of the…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) training has markedly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet the mechanisms by which CoT training enhances generalization remain inadequately understood. In this work, we demonstrate…

The incredible success of transformers on sequence modeling tasks can be largely attributed to the self-attention mechanism, which allows information to be transferred between different parts of a sequence. Self-attention allows…

We formally study the logical reasoning capabilities of decoder-only Transformers in the context of the boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem. First, we prove by construction that decoder-only Transformers can decide 3-SAT, in a non-uniform…

In complex inferential tasks like question answering, machine learning models must confront two challenges: the need to implement a compositional reasoning process, and, in many applications, the need for this reasoning process to be…

When writing programs, people have the ability to tackle a new complex task by decomposing it into smaller and more familiar subtasks. While it is difficult to measure whether neural program synthesis methods have similar capabilities, what…

Compositional generalization-the systematic combination of known components into novel structures-remains a core challenge in cognitive science and machine learning. Although transformer-based large language models can exhibit strong…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) is a method that enables language models to handle complex reasoning tasks by decomposing them into simpler steps. Despite its success, the underlying mechanics of CoT are not yet fully understood. In an attempt to…

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit unexpected errors or unintended behavior, even at scale. While recent work reveals the discrepancy between LLMs and humans in skill compositions, the learning dynamics of skill compositions and the…

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…

State-of-the-art deep-learning-based approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP) are credited with various capabilities that involve reasoning with natural language texts. In this paper we carry out a large-scale empirical study…

Humans are highly efficient learners, with the ability to grasp the meaning of a new concept from just a few examples. Unlike popular computer vision systems, humans can flexibly leverage the compositional structure of the visual world,…

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at factual retrieval, they often struggle with the "curse of two-hop reasoning" in compositional tasks. Recent research suggests that parameter-sharing transformers can bridge this gap by forming a…

How to usefully encode compositional task structure has long been a core challenge in AI. Recent work in chain of thought prompting has shown that for very large neural language models (LMs), explicitly demonstrating the inferential steps…

We study implicit reasoning, i.e. the ability to combine knowledge or rules within a single forward pass. While transformer-based large language models store substantial factual knowledge and rules, they often fail to compose this knowledge…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is an efficient prompting method that enables the reasoning ability of large language models by augmenting the query using multiple examples with multiple intermediate steps. Despite the empirical success, the…

Federated learning benefits from cross-training strategies, which enables models to train on data from distinct sources to improve generalization capability. However, due to inherent differences in data distributions, the optimization goals…

Transformers pretrained via next token prediction learn to factor their world into parts, representing these factors in orthogonal subspaces of the residual stream. We formalize two representational hypotheses: (1) a representation in the…