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Related papers: How do Transformers Learn Implicit Reasoning?

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We propose a new architectural change, and post-training pipeline, for making LLMs more verbose reasoners by teaching a model to truncate forward passes early. We augment an existing transformer architecture with an early-exit mechanism at…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Elizabeth Pavlova , Mariia Koroliuk , Karthik Viswanathan , Cameron Tice , Edward James Young , Puria Radmard

Pre-trained language models (LMs) are able to perform complex reasoning without explicit fine-tuning. To understand how pre-training with a next-token prediction objective contributes to the emergence of such reasoning capability, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Xinyi Wang , Alfonso Amayuelas , Kexun Zhang , Liangming Pan , Wenhu Chen , William Yang Wang

Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Yuxuan Li , James L. McClelland

Locating and editing knowledge in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for enhancing their accuracy, safety, and inference rationale. We introduce ``concept editing'', an innovative variation of knowledge editing that uncovers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Nura Aljaafari , Danilo S. Carvalho , André Freitas

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding text and generating high-quality responses. However, a critical distinction from human cognition is their typical lack of a distinct internal `reading'…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Yuanxin Wang , Ganesh Venkatesh

Even though large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in solving various natural language tasks, the capability of an LLM to follow human instructions is still a concern. Recent works have shown great improvements…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Xinbo Wu , Lav R. Varshney

Large language models (LLMs) have led to breakthroughs in language tasks, yet the internal mechanisms that enable their remarkable generalization and reasoning abilities remain opaque. This lack of transparency presents challenges such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Haiyan Zhao , Fan Yang , Bo Shen , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Mengnan Du

Algorithmic reasoning requires capabilities which are most naturally understood through recurrent models of computation, like the Turing machine. However, Transformer models, while lacking recurrence, are able to perform such reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Bingbin Liu , Jordan T. Ash , Surbhi Goel , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Cyril Zhang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting substantially improves the sample efficiency of transformers, reducing the complexity of tasks like parity learning from exponential to polynomial in the input length. However, generating explicit reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yixiao Huang , Hanlin Zhu , Zixuan Wang , Jiantao Jiao , Stuart Russell , Somayeh Sojoudi , Song Mei

Recent studies have discovered that Chain-of-Thought prompting (CoT) can dramatically improve the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly when dealing with complex tasks involving mathematics or reasoning. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Guhao Feng , Bohang Zhang , Yuntian Gu , Haotian Ye , Di He , Liwei Wang

Standard Transformers have a fixed computational depth, fundamentally limiting their ability to generalize to tasks requiring variable-depth reasoning, such as multi-hop graph traversal or nested logic. We propose a depth-recurrent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Hung-Hsuan Chen

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Kaiyu He , Zhang Mian , Peilin Wu , Xinya Du , Zhiyu Chen

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have popularized the chain-of-thought (CoT) paradigm, in which models produce explicit reasoning steps in natural language. Although this approach improves interpretability and facilitates…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 José I. Orlicki

Recent works have shown how the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be applied to domains beyond natural language processing, such as planning and interaction for robots. These embodied problems require an agent to…

How can pretrained language models (PLMs) learn factual knowledge from the training set? We investigate the two most important mechanisms: reasoning and memorization. Prior work has attempted to quantify the number of facts PLMs learn, but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Nora Kassner , Benno Krojer , Hinrich Schütze

Reasoning-oriented large language models (RLMs) achieve strong gains on tasks such as mathematics and coding by generating explicit intermediate reasoning. However, their impact on machine translation (MT) remains underexplored. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Sara Rajaee , Sebastian Vincent , Alexandre Berard , Marzieh Fadaee , Kelly Marchisio , Tom Kocmi

Recent Large Multimodal Models have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, especially in solving complex mathematical problems and realizing accurate spatial perception. Our key insight is that these emerging abilities can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Weiliang Tang , Dong Jing , Jia-Hui Pan , Zhiwu Lu , Yun-Hui Liu , Li Erran Li , Mingyu Ding , Chi-Wing Fu

When large language models (LLMs) use in-context learning (ICL) to solve a new task, they must infer latent concepts from demonstration examples. This raises the question of whether and how transformers represent latent structures as part…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Guan Zhe Hong , Bhavya Vasudeva , Vatsal Sharan , Cyrus Rashtchian , Prabhakar Raghavan , Rina Panigrahy

Understanding reasoning in large language models is complicated by evaluations that conflate multiple reasoning types. We isolate analogical reasoning, where a model transfers an attribute between entities that share known properties, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Ruichen Xu , Wenjing Yan , Ying-Jun Angela Zhang

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly focused on "reasoning" ability, a concept with many overlapping definitions in the LLM discourse. We take a more structured approach, distinguishing meta-level reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Nick Ferguson , Alan Bundy , Kwabena Nuamah