Related papers: Understanding and Improving Length Generalization …
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs), such as linear attention and state-space models, have gained popularity due to their constant per-token complexity when processing long contexts. However, these recurrent models struggle with tasks that…
We study length generalization in sequence models on a composite problem involving both state tracking and associative recall. Prior work finds that recurrent networks handle state tracking well but struggle with recall, whereas…
Long sequences occur in abundance within real-world scenarios, hence properly modelling them opens numerous down-stream use-cases. Deep neural networks, however, have often struggled with these for a variety of reasons. Recent advances,…
Background: Deep learning models are typically trained using stochastic gradient descent or one of its variants. These methods update the weights using their gradient, estimated from a small fraction of the training data. It has been…
In this paper, we investigate the length-extension of state-space models (SSMs) in language modeling. Length extension involves training models on short sequences and testing them on longer ones. We show that state-space models trained with…
A longstanding challenge for the Machine Learning community is the one of developing models that are capable of processing and learning from very long sequences of data. The outstanding results of Transformers-based networks (e.g., Large…
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive performance and surprising emergent properties. However, their effectiveness remains limited by the fixed context window of the transformer architecture, posing challenges for…
It is a widely known issue that Transformers, when trained on shorter sequences, fail to generalize robustly to longer ones at test time. This raises the question of whether Transformer models are real reasoning engines, despite their…
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…
It has been observed in recent years that transformers have problems with length generalization for certain types of reasoning and arithmetic tasks. In particular, the performance of a transformer model trained on tasks (say addition) up to…
Effectively learning from sequential data is a longstanding goal of Artificial Intelligence, especially in the case of long sequences. From the dawn of Machine Learning, several researchers have pursued algorithms and architectures capable…
We study the problem of length generalization (LG) in transformers: the ability of a model trained on shorter sequences to maintain performance when evaluated on much longer, previously unseen inputs. Prior work by Huang et al. (2025)…
Out-of-distribution generalization capabilities of sequence-to-sequence models can be studied from the lens of two crucial forms of generalization: length generalization -- the ability to generalize to longer sequences than ones seen during…
Inducing sparseness while training neural networks has been shown to yield models with a lower memory footprint but similar effectiveness to dense models. However, sparseness is typically induced starting from a dense model, and thus this…
Recurrent neural networks are a widely used class of neural architectures. They have, however, two shortcomings. First, it is difficult to understand what exactly they learn. Second, they tend to work poorly on sequences requiring long-term…
Whether language models can systematically generalize remains actively debated. Yet empirical performance is jointly shaped by multiple factors such as training data, training paradigms, and inference-time strategies, making failures…
Machine learning promises methods that generalize well from finite labeled data. However, the brittleness of existing neural net approaches is revealed by notable failures, such as the existence of adversarial examples that are…
Length generalization, defined as the ability to extrapolate from shorter training sequences to longer test ones, is a significant challenge for language models. This issue persists even with large-scale Transformers handling relatively…
We consider problems of making sequences of decisions to accomplish tasks, interacting via the medium of language. These problems are often tackled with reinforcement learning approaches. We find that these models do not generalize well…
End-to-end trained Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been successfully applied to numerous problems that require processing sequences, such as image captioning, machine translation, and text recognition. However, RNNs often struggle to…