Related papers: How do Transformers Learn Implicit Reasoning?
Large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters exhibit in-context learning abilities, enabling few-shot learning on tasks that the model was not specifically trained for. Traditional models achieve breakthrough performance on…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on multimodal tasks, without any multimodal finetuning. They are the building block for Large Multimodal Models, yet, we still lack a proper understanding of their…
Transformer LLMs have been shown to exhibit strong reasoning ability that scales with inference-time compute, most prominently through token-space "thinking" chains of thought. A growing line of work pushes extra computation into the…
The ability to reason lies at the core of artificial intelligence (AI), and challenging problems usually call for deeper and longer reasoning to tackle. A crucial question about AI reasoning is whether models can extrapolate learned…
Symbolic logical reasoning is a critical yet underexplored capability of large language models (LLMs), providing reliable and verifiable decision-making in high-stakes domains such as mathematical reasoning and legal judgment. In this…
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at problem solving by generating chain of thoughts in natural language, but such verbal thinking is computationally costly and prone to overthinking. A recent work instead proposes a latent thinking…
In-context learning (ICL) refers to the ability of a model to learn new tasks from examples in its input without any parameter updates. In contrast to previous theories of ICL relying on toy models and data settings, recently it has been…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on complex tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, conventional CoT relies on explicitly verbalized intermediate steps, which constrains its broader…
The capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models have been sketched out in great detail in recent years, providing an intriguing yet conflicting picture. On the one hand, LLMs demonstrate a general ability to solve problems. On the…
As large language models become increasingly capable, there is growing concern that they may develop reasoning processes that are encoded or hidden from human oversight. To investigate whether current interpretability techniques can…
Large language models (LLMs) have advanced general-purpose reasoning, showing strong performance across diverse tasks. However, existing methods often rely on implicit exploration, where the model follows stochastic and unguided reasoning…
Humans acquire language through implicit learning, absorbing complex patterns without explicit awareness. While LLMs demonstrate impressive linguistic capabilities, it remains unclear whether they exhibit human-like pattern recognition…
Language models are increasingly capable, yet still fail at a seemingly simple task of multi-digit multiplication. In this work, we study why, by reverse-engineering a model that successfully learns multiplication via \emph{implicit…
Transformer-based large language models have displayed impressive in-context learning capabilities, where a pre-trained model can handle new tasks without fine-tuning by simply augmenting the query with some input-output examples from that…
Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit abrupt emergent behavior, whereby new abilities arise at certain points during their training. This phenomenon, commonly referred to as a ''phase transition'', remains poorly understood. In this…
Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning generated by large language models (LLMs) is often unfaithful: intermediate steps can be logically inconsistent or fail to reflect the causal relationship leading to the final answer. Despite extensive…
Despite readily memorizing world knowledge about entities, pre-trained language models (LMs) struggle to compose together two or more facts to perform multi-hop reasoning in question-answering tasks. In this work, we propose techniques that…
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across many NLP tasks, their opaque internal mechanisms hinder trustworthiness and safe deployment. Existing surveys in explainable AI largely focus on post-hoc explanation…
Recently, techniques such as explicit structured reasoning have demonstrated strong test-time scaling behavior by enforcing a separation between the model's internal "thinking" process and the final response. A key factor influencing answer…
Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve strong performance on many tasks by producing step-by-step reasoning before giving a final output, often referred to as chain-of-thought reasoning (CoT). It is tempting to interpret these CoT…