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Causal reasoning has been an indispensable capability for humans and other intelligent animals to interact with the physical world. In this work, we propose to endow an artificial agent with the capability of causal reasoning for completing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-07 Suraj Nair , Yuke Zhu , Silvio Savarese , Li Fei-Fei

The training and generalization dynamics of the Transformer's core mechanism, namely the Attention mechanism, remain under-explored. Besides, existing analyses primarily focus on single-head attention. Inspired by the demonstrated benefits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Puneesh Deora , Rouzbeh Ghaderi , Hossein Taheri , Christos Thrampoulidis

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior multi-task capabilities, understanding the learning mechanisms behind this is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we attempt to understand such mechanisms from the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Yongqi Leng , Deyi Xiong

This research addresses a fundamental question in AI: whether large language models truly understand concepts or simply recognize patterns. The authors propose bidirectional reasoning,the ability to apply transformations in both directions…

Function calling (FC) has emerged as a powerful technique for facilitating large language models (LLMs) to interact with external systems and perform structured tasks. However, the mechanisms through which it influences model behavior…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Zhenlan Ji , Daoyuan Wu , Wenxuan Wang , Pingchuan Ma , Shuai Wang , Lei Ma

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in in-context learning (ICL), where models adapt to new tasks through example-based prompts without requiring parameter updates. However, understanding how tasks are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Baturay Saglam , Xinyang Hu , Zhuoran Yang , Dionysis Kalogerias , Amin Karbasi

The ability to pick up on language signals in an ongoing interaction is crucial for future machine learning models to collaborate and interact with humans naturally. In this paper, we present an initial study that evaluates intra-episodic…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Philipp Sadler , Sherzod Hakimov , David Schlangen

This survey reviews works in which language models (LMs) are augmented with reasoning skills and the ability to use tools. The former is defined as decomposing a potentially complex task into simpler subtasks while the latter consists in…

Large language models (LMs) are able to in-context learn -- perform a new task via inference alone by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (demonstrations) and making predictions for new inputs. However, there has been little…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Sewon Min , Xinxi Lyu , Ari Holtzman , Mikel Artetxe , Mike Lewis , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Luke Zettlemoyer

We lack a systematic understanding of the effects of fine-tuning (via methods such as instruction-tuning or reinforcement learning from human feedback), particularly on tasks outside the narrow fine-tuning distribution. In a simplified…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Suhas Kotha , Jacob Mitchell Springer , Aditi Raghunathan

We study implicit reasoning, i.e. the ability to combine knowledge or rules within a single forward pass. While transformer-based large language models store substantial factual knowledge and rules, they often fail to compose this knowledge…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Harsh Kohli , Srinivasan Parthasarathy , Huan Sun , Yuekun Yao

The potential of large language models (LLMs) to simultaneously perform a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks has been the subject of extensive research. Although instruction tuning has proven to be a data-efficient method…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Chufan Shi , Yixuan Su , Cheng Yang , Yujiu Yang , Deng Cai

While language models demonstrate sophisticated syntactic capabilities, the extent to which their internal mechanisms align with cross-constructional principles studied in linguistics remains poorly understood. This study investigates…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Ryoma Kumon , Hitomi Yanaka

A widespread approach to processing spoken language is to first automatically transcribe it into text. An alternative is to use an end-to-end approach: recent works have proposed to learn semantic embeddings of spoken language from images…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Grzegorz Chrupała

Research in mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain behaviors of machine learning models in terms of their internal components. However, most previous work either focuses on simple behaviors in small models, or describes complicated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Kevin Wang , Alexandre Variengien , Arthur Conmy , Buck Shlegeris , Jacob Steinhardt

Auxiliary function is a helpful component to improve language model's code generation ability. However, a systematic exploration of how they affect has yet to be done. In this work, we comprehensively evaluate the ability to utilize…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Seonghyeon Lee , Sanghwan Jang , Seongbo Jang , Dongha Lee , Hwanjo Yu

We introduce meta-prompting, an effective scaffolding technique designed to enhance the functionality of language models (LMs). This approach transforms a single LM into a multi-faceted conductor, adept at managing and integrating multiple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Mirac Suzgun , Adam Tauman Kalai

Deep multitask learning boosts performance by sharing learned structure across related tasks. This paper adapts ideas from deep multitask learning to the setting where only a single task is available. The method is formalized as pseudo-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-13 Elliot Meyerson , Risto Miikkulainen

The primary paradigm for multi-task training in natural language processing is to represent the input with a shared pre-trained language model, and add a small, thin network (head) per task. Given an input, a target head is the head that is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Mor Geva , Uri Katz , Aviv Ben-Arie , Jonathan Berant

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit strong translation abilities, even without task-specific fine-tuning. However, the internal mechanisms governing this innate capability remain largely opaque. To demystify this process, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Xinwei Wu , Heng Liu , Xiaohu Zhao , Yuqi Ren , Linlong Xu , Longyue Wang , Deyi Xiong , Weihua Luo , Kaifu Zhang