Related papers: Limit Analysis for Symbolic Multi-step Reasoning T…
Recent generations of language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their…
Inference-time scaling via chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is a major driver of state-of-the-art LLM performance, but it comes with substantial latency and compute costs. We address a fundamental theoretical question: how many reasoning…
Chain-of-thought prompting has popularized step-by-step reasoning in large language models, yet model performance still degrades as problem complexity and context length grow. By decomposing difficult tasks with long contexts into shorter,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities to solve problems requiring multiple reasoning steps, yet the internal mechanisms enabling such capabilities remain elusive. Unlike existing surveys that primarily focus on…
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…
Neural reasoning accuracy improves when generating intermediate reasoning steps. However, the source of this improvement is yet unclear. Here, we investigate and factorize the benefit of generating intermediate steps for symbolic reasoning.…
Transformers, the backbone of modern large language models (LLMs), face inherent architectural limitations that impede their reasoning capabilities. Unlike recurrent networks, Transformers lack recurrent connections, confining them to…
Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's o1 have demonstrated remarkable abilities in complex reasoning tasks by scaling test-time compute and exhibiting human-like deep thinking. However, we identify a phenomenon we term…
Multi-step reasoning improves the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) but increases the risk of errors propagating through intermediate steps. Process reward models (PRMs) mitigate this by scoring each step individually, enabling…
The transformer has revolutionized modern AI across language, vision, and beyond. It consists of $L$ layers, each running $H$ attention heads in parallel and feeding the combined output to the subsequent layer. In attention, the input…
Large transformer models have shown extraordinary success in achieving state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing applications. However, training and deploying these models can be prohibitively costly for long sequences,…
We conduct a systematic study of the approximation properties of Transformer for sequence modeling with long, sparse and complicated memory. We investigate the mechanisms through which different components of Transformer, such as the…
Despite the significant improvements achieved by large language models (LLMs) in English reasoning tasks, these models continue to struggle with multilingual reasoning. Recent studies leverage a full-parameter and two-stage training…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with computational efficiency and error propagation in multi-step reasoning tasks. While recent advancements on prompting and post-training have enabled LLMs to perform step-wise reasoning, they…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive reasoning abilities, yet their reliance on structured step-by-step processing reveals a critical limitation. In contrast, human cognition fluidly adapts between intuitive, heuristic (System 1)…
Much theoretical work has described the ability of transformers to represent formal languages. However, linking theoretical results to empirical performance is not straightforward due to the complex interplay between the architecture, the…
We study the capabilities of the transformer architecture with varying depth. Specifically, we designed a novel set of sequence learning tasks to systematically evaluate and comprehend how the depth of transformer affects its ability to…
Step-by-step reasoning is widely used to enhance the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) in complex problems. Evaluating the quality of reasoning traces is crucial for understanding and improving LLM reasoning. However,…
The field of Language Reasoning Models (LRMs) has been very active over the past few years with advances in training and inference techniques enabling LRMs to reason longer, and more accurately. However, a growing body of studies show that…
We investigate the capabilities of transformer models on relational reasoning tasks. In these tasks, models are trained on a set of strings encoding abstract relations, and are then tested out-of-distribution on data that contains symbols…