Related papers: Compositional Reasoning with Transformers, RNNs, a…
Reasoning in Large Language Models incurs significant inference-time compute, yet the token-level information structure of reasoning traces remains underexplored. We observe that reasoning tokens split into two functional types: low-entropy…
The extent to which neural networks are able to acquire and represent symbolic rules remains a key topic of research and debate. Much current work focuses on the impressive capabilities of large language models, as well as their often…
Analogical reasoning is a hallmark of human intelligence, enabling us to solve new problems by transferring knowledge from one situation to another. Yet, developing artificial intelligence systems capable of robust human-like analogical…
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve promising performance but compromise token efficiency due to verbose reasoning processes. Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) posits that complex problems can be solved more efficiently through…
Reasoning-trained language models often spend more tokens on harder problems, but longer chains of thought do not show whether a model is merely computing for more steps or following a different internal trajectory. We study this…
Recent theoretical results show transformers cannot express sequential reasoning problems over long inputs, intuitively because their computational depth is bounded. However, prior work treats the depth as a constant, leaving it unclear to…
A number of problems in the processing of sound and natural language, as well as in other areas, can be reduced to simultaneously reading an input sequence and writing an output sequence of generally different length. There are well…
Recent reasoning large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable improvements in mathematical reasoning capabilities through long Chain-of-Thought. The reasoning tokens of these models enable self-correction within reasoning…
Large language models (LLMs) are very performant connectionist systems, but do they exhibit more compositionality? More importantly, is that part of why they perform so well? We present empirical analyses across four LLM families (12…
A formal description of the compositionality of neural networks is associated directly with the formal grammar-structure of the objects it seeks to represent. This formal grammar-structure specifies the kind of components that make up an…
Transformers have revolutionized almost all natural language processing (NLP) tasks but suffer from memory and computational complexity that scales quadratically with sequence length. In contrast, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) exhibit…
Different types of reasoning impose different structural demands on representational systems, yet no systematic account of these demands exists across psychology, AI, and philosophy of mind. I propose a framework identifying four structural…
Natural Language Generation (NLG) models are prone to generating repetitive utterances. In this work, we study the repetition problem for encoder-decoder models, using both recurrent neural network (RNN) and transformer architectures. To…
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used to elicit explicit reasoning from large language models for code (LLM4Code). However, its impact on robustness and the stability of reasoning trajectories under realistic input perturbations…
Large language models based on the transformer architecture can solve highly complex tasks, yet their fundamental limitations on simple algorithmic problems remain poorly understood. In this work, we focus on basic counting tasks and…
To apply neural sequence models such as the Transformers to music generation tasks, one has to represent a piece of music by a sequence of tokens drawn from a finite set of pre-defined vocabulary. Such a vocabulary usually involves tokens…
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…
The inherent capabilities of a language model (LM) and the reasoning strategies it employs jointly determine its performance in reasoning tasks. While test-time scaling is regarded as an effective approach to tackling complex reasoning…
Compositional Reasoning (CR) entails grasping the significance of attributes, relations, and word order. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs), comprising a visual encoder and a Large Language Model (LLM) decoder, have demonstrated…
Despite their successes, deep learning models struggle with tasks requiring complex reasoning and function composition. We present a theoretical and empirical investigation into the limitations of Structured State Space Models (SSMs) and…