Related papers: Disentangling Recall and Reasoning in Transformer …
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in handling complex tasks requiring both extensive knowledge and reasoning abilities. However, the existing LLM inference pipeline operates as an opaque process without…
Large language models (LLMs) excel on a variety of reasoning benchmarks, but previous studies suggest they sometimes struggle to generalize to unseen questions, potentially due to over-reliance on memorized training examples. However, the…
Transformer-based language models have achieved significant success; however, their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque due to the complexity of non-linear interactions and high-dimensional operations. While previous studies have…
This paper presents ReasonFormer, a unified reasoning framework for mirroring the modular and compositional reasoning process of humans in complex decision-making. Inspired by dual-process theory in cognitive science, the representation…
This study investigates the in-context learning capabilities of various decoder-only transformer-based language models with different model sizes and training data, including GPT2, SmolLM2, OpenELM, TinyLlama, Stable LM, and Gemma 2. We…
Recent studies on transformer-based language models show that they can answer questions by reasoning over knowledge provided as part of the context (i.e., in-context reasoning). However, since the available knowledge is often not filtered…
Incorporating explicit reasoning rules within the latent space of language models (LMs) offers a promising pathway to enhance generalisation, interpretability, and controllability. While current Transformer-based language models have shown…
Transformers have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multi-step reasoning tasks. However, understandings of the underlying mechanisms by which they acquire these abilities through training remain limited, particularly from a…
In this paper, I introduce the retrieval problem, a simple yet common reasoning task that can be solved only by transformers with a minimum number of layers, which grows logarithmically with the input size. I empirically show that large…
Recent work has identified a subset of attention heads in Transformer as retrieval heads, which are responsible for retrieving information from the context. In this work, we first investigate retrieval heads in multilingual contexts. In…
While large language models (LLMs) leverage both knowledge and reasoning during inference, the capacity to distinguish between them plays a pivotal role in model analysis, interpretability, and development. Inspired by dual-system cognitive…
Transformers demonstrate impressive performance on a range of reasoning benchmarks. To evaluate the degree to which these abilities are a result of actual reasoning, existing work has focused on developing sophisticated benchmarks for…
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) generate explicit reasoning traces alongside final answers, yet the extent to which these traces influence answer generation remains unclear. In this work, we conduct a three-stage investigation into the…
Despite the recent progress in long-context language models, it remains elusive how transformer-based models exhibit the capability to retrieve relevant information from arbitrary locations within the long context. This paper aims to…
Modern large language models (LLMs) excel at tasks that require storing and retrieving knowledge, such as factual recall and question answering. Transformers are central to this capability because they can encode information during training…
Reasoning is a core capability of large language models, yet how multi-step reasoning is learned and executed remains unclear. We study this question in a controlled cellular-automata (1dCA) framework that excludes memorisation by using…
Underlying mechanisms of memorization in LLMs -- the verbatim reproduction of training data -- remain poorly understood. What exact part of the network decides to retrieve a token that we would consider as start of memorization sequence?…
The transformer architecture is central to the success of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), in part due to its surprising ability to perform a wide range of tasks - including mathematical reasoning, memorization, and retrieval - using…
Understanding how Transformer-based language models store and retrieve factual associations is critical for improving interpretability and enabling targeted model editing. Prior work, primarily on GPT-style models, has identified MLP…
Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve strong reasoning performance by incorporating functional symbolic representations that abstractly describe graph traversal algorithms and step-by-step reasoning in…