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We investigate the capabilities of transformer models on relational reasoning tasks. In these tasks, models are trained on a set of strings encoding abstract relations, and are then tested out-of-distribution on data that contains symbols…
In-context learning has been recognized as a key factor in the success of Large Language Models (LLMs). It refers to the model's ability to learn patterns on the fly from provided in-context examples in the prompt during inference. Previous…
The Transformer model has achieved state-of-the-art performance in many sequence modeling tasks. However, how to leverage model capacity with large or variable depths is still an open challenge. We present a probabilistic framework to…
Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to significantly improve the performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly in arithmetic and reasoning tasks, by instructing the model to produce intermediate reasoning steps.…
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…
Noise is ubiquitous in data used to train large language models, but it is not well understood whether these models are able to correctly generalize to inputs generated without noise. Here, we study noise-robust learning: are transformers…
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…
Logical reasoning is central to complex human activities, such as thinking, debating, and planning; it is also a central component of many AI systems as well. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which encoder-only transformer…
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…
This paper investigates the logical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). For a precisely defined yet tractable formulation, we choose the conceptually simple but technically complex task of constructing proofs in Boolean…
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…
The remarkable capability of over-parameterised neural networks to generalise effectively has been explained by invoking a ``simplicity bias'': neural networks prevent overfitting by initially learning simple classifiers before progressing…
In recent years, Deep Learning has become the go-to solution for a broad range of applications, often outperforming state-of-the-art. However, it is important, for both theoreticians and practitioners, to gain a deeper understanding of the…
Investigating the reasoning abilities of transformer models, and discovering new challenging tasks for them, has been a topic of much interest. Recent studies have found these models to be surprisingly strong at performing deductive…
Recent studies have highlighted the limitations of large language models in mathematical reasoning, particularly their inability to capture the underlying logic. Inspired by meta-learning, we propose that models should acquire not only…
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…
Recent work has shown that large pretrained Language Models (LMs) can not only perform remarkably well on a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks but also start improving on reasoning tasks such as arithmetic induction, symbolic…
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…
We analyze the capabilities of Transformer language models in learning compositional discrete tasks. To this end, we evaluate training LLaMA models and prompting GPT-4 and Gemini on four tasks demanding to learn a composition of several…
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…