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Protein language models (PLMs) have become widely adopted as general-purpose models, demonstrating strong performance in protein engineering and de novo design. Like large language models (LLMs), they are typically trained as deep…

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Harsh Kohli , Srinivasan Parthasarathy , Huan Sun , Yuekun Yao

Work on scaling laws has found that large language models (LMs) show predictable improvements to overall loss with increased scale (model size, training data, and compute). Here, we present evidence for the claim that LMs may show inverse…

Transformers have supplanted recurrent models in a large number of NLP tasks. However, the differences in their abilities to model different syntactic properties remain largely unknown. Past works suggest that LSTMs generalize very well on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-09 Satwik Bhattamishra , Kabir Ahuja , Navin Goyal

What are the root causes of hallucinations in large language models (LLMs)? We use Communication Complexity to prove that the Transformer layer is incapable of composing functions (e.g., identify a grandparent of a person in a genealogy) if…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-28 Binghui Peng , Srini Narayanan , Christos Papadimitriou

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive linguistic competence but also produce inaccurate or fabricated outputs, often called ``hallucinations''. Engineering approaches usually regard hallucination as a defect to be minimized, while…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Bowen Xu

When artificial intelligence mistakes memorization for intelligence, it creates a dangerous mirage of reasoning. Existing studies treat memorization and self-knowledge deficits in LLMs as separate issues and do not recognize an intertwining…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Sahil Kale

The generalization of language models (LMs) is undergoing active debates, contrasting their potential for general intelligence with their struggles with basic knowledge composition (e.g., reverse/transition curse). This paper uncovers the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Letian Peng , Chenyang An , Shibo Hao , Chengyu Dong , Jingbo Shang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Hattie Zhou , Arwen Bradley , Etai Littwin , Noam Razin , Omid Saremi , Josh Susskind , Samy Bengio , Preetum Nakkiran

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable fluency across linguistic and reasoning tasks but remain systematically prone to hallucination. Prevailing accounts attribute hallucinations to data gaps, limited context, or optimization…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Richard Ackermann , Simeon Emanuilov

Transformers are theoretically reversal-invariant: their function class does not prefer left-to-right over right-to-left mappings. Yet empirical studies on natural language repeatedly report a "reversal curse," and recent work on temporal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Mihir Sahasrabudhe

Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 utilize the powerful in-context learning (ICL) capability of Transformer architecture to learn on the fly from limited examples. While ICL underpins many LLM applications, its full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Xingxuan Zhang , Haoran Wang , Jiansheng Li , Yuan Xue , Shikai Guan , Renzhe Xu , Hao Zou , Han Yu , Peng Cui

Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in various domains, yet they often suffer from repetitive text generation, a phenomenon we refer to as the "Repeat Curse". While previous studies have proposed decoding strategies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Junchi Yao , Shu Yang , Jianhua Xu , Lijie Hu , Mengdi Li , Di Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance on complex reasoning tasks, yet they frequently fail on basic numerical problems, producing incorrect outputs. Inspired by Benford's Law, a statistical pattern in which lower…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Jiandong Shao , Yao Lu , Jianfei Yang

We are interested in understanding how well Transformer language models (TLMs) can perform reasoning tasks when trained on knowledge encoded in the form of natural language. We investigate their systematic generalization abilities on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Nicolas Gontier , Koustuv Sinha , Siva Reddy , Christopher Pal

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Mattia Opper , Roland Fernandez , Paul Smolensky , Jianfeng Gao

In the last decade, the generalization and adaptation abilities of deep learning models were typically evaluated on fixed training and test distributions. Contrary to traditional deep learning, large language models (LLMs) are (i) even more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Fırat Öncel , Matthias Bethge , Beyza Ermis , Mirco Ravanelli , Cem Subakan , Çağatay Yıldız

Transformers have become the foundational architecture for a broad spectrum of sequence modeling applications, underpinning state-of-the-art systems in natural language processing, vision, and beyond. However, their theoretical limitations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Michelle Yuan , Weiyi Sun , Amir H. Rezaeian , Jyotika Singh , Sandip Ghoshal , Yao-Ting Wang , Miguel Ballesteros , Yassine Benajiba

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved a milestone that undenia-bly changed many held beliefs in artificial intelligence (AI). However, there remains many limitations of these LLMs when it comes to true language understanding,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Walid S. Saba

Large language models require updates to remain up-to-date or adapt to new domains by fine-tuning them with new documents. One key is memorizing the latest information in a way that the memorized information is extractable with a query…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Kuniaki Saito , Kihyuk Sohn , Chen-Yu Lee , Yoshitaka Ushiku