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Related papers: Constant Bit-size Transformers Are Turing Complete

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Using nonstandard analysis, we will extend the classical Turing machines into the internal Turing machines. The internal Turing machines have the capability to work with infinite ($*$-finite) number of bits while keeping the finite…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Ken Loo

Transformers are being used extensively across several sequence modeling tasks. Significant research effort has been devoted to experimentally probe the inner workings of Transformers. However, our conceptual and theoretical understanding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Satwik Bhattamishra , Arkil Patel , Navin Goyal

By considering a discrete tape where each cell corresponds to an integer, thus to a possible sum, a pseudo-polynomial solution can be given to subset sum problem, which is an NP-complete problem and a cornerstone application for this study,…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2024-01-08 Yigit Oktar

In this article we prove that the general transformer neural model undergirding modern large language models (LLMs) is Turing complete under reasonable assumptions. This is the first work to directly address the Turing completeness of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Jesse Roberts

Transformers are unable to model long-term memories effectively, since the amount of computation they need to perform grows with the context length. While variations of efficient transformers have been proposed, they all have a finite…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-28 Pedro Henrique Martins , Zita Marinho , André F. T. Martins

Length generalization refers to the ability to extrapolate from short training sequences to long test sequences and is a challenge for current large language models. While prior work has proposed some architecture or data format changes to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Kaiying Hou , David Brandfonbrener , Sham Kakade , Samy Jelassi , Eran Malach

We propose Token Turing Machines (TTM), a sequential, autoregressive Transformer model with memory for real-world sequential visual understanding. Our model is inspired by the seminal Neural Turing Machine, and has an external memory…

Test-time scaling improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by allocating extra compute to generate longer Chains-of-Thoughts (CoTs). This enables models to tackle more complex problem by breaking them down into…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Adel Javanmard , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Vahab Mirrokni

A common lens to theoretically study neural net architectures is to analyze the functions they can approximate. However, constructions from approximation theory may be unrealistic and therefore less meaningful. For example, a common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-31 Colin Wei , Yining Chen , Tengyu Ma

We prove the Extended Church-Turing Thesis: Every effective algorithm can be efficiently simulated by a Turing machine. This is accomplished by emulating an effective algorithm via an abstract state machine, and simulating such an abstract…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2012-08-01 Nachum Dershowitz , Evgenia Falkovich

The following problem is considered. A Turing machine $M$, that accepts a string of fixed length $t$ as input, runs for a time not exceeding a fixed value $n$ and is guaranteed to produce a binary output, is given. It's required to find a…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Marsel Matdinov

We introduce a new type of generalized Turing machines (GTMs), which are intended as a tool for the mathematician who studies computability in Analysis. In a single tape cell a GTM can store a symbol, a real number, a continuous real…

Logic · Mathematics 2015-07-01 Nazanin Tavana , Klaus Weihrauch

We consider graph Turing machines, a model of parallel computation on a graph, in which each vertex is only capable of performing one of a finite number of operations. This model of computation is a natural generalization of several…

Logic · Mathematics 2017-03-29 Nathanael Ackerman , Cameron Freer

Finite-state complexity is a variant of algorithmic information theory obtained by replacing Turing machines with finite transducers. We consider the state-size of transducers needed for minimal descriptions of arbitrary strings and, as our…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2010-08-11 Cristian Calude , Kai Salomaa , Tania Roblot

Algorithms which learn environments represented by automata in the past have had complexity scaling with the number of states in the automaton, which can be exponentially large even for automata recognizing regular expressions with a small…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Ali Cataltepe , Vanessa Kosoy

We consider computations of a Turing machine under noise that causes consecutive violations of the machine's transition function. Given a constant upper bound B on the size of bursts of faults, we construct a Turing machine M(B) subject to…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2012-03-08 Ilir Capuni , Peter Gacs

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Gilad Yehudai , Haim Kaplan , Guy Dar , Royi Rassin , Asma Ghandeharioun , Mor Geva , Amir Globerson

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and transformers have been shown to be Turing-complete, but this result assumes infinite precision in their hidden representations, positional encodings for transformers, and unbounded computation time in…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2023-09-27 Ankur Mali , Alexander Ororbia , Daniel Kifer , Lee Giles

Recent works attribute the capability of in-context learning (ICL) in large pre-trained language models to implicitly simulating and fine-tuning an internal model (e.g., linear or 2-layer MLP) during inference. However, such constructions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Abhishek Panigrahi , Sadhika Malladi , Mengzhou Xia , Sanjeev Arora

We start by an introduction to the basic concepts of computability theory and the introduction of the concept of Turing machine and computation universality. Then se turn to the exploration of trade-offs between different measures of…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2011-04-19 Joost J. Joosten , Fernando Soler-Toscano , Hector Zenil