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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…
Transformer language models have demonstrated impressive generalization capabilities in natural language domains, yet we lack a fine-grained understanding of how such generalization arises. In this paper, we investigate length…
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…
The ability to reason lies at the core of artificial intelligence (AI), and challenging problems usually call for deeper and longer reasoning to tackle. A crucial question about AI reasoning is whether models can extrapolate learned…
Transformer models have achieved remarkable results in a wide range of applications. However, their scalability is hampered by the quadratic time and memory complexity of the self-attention mechanism concerning the sequence length. This…
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…
Transformers can under some circumstances generalize to novel problem instances whose constituent parts might have been encountered during training, but whose compositions have not. What mechanisms underlie this ability for compositional…
Large language models exhibit surprising emergent generalization properties, yet also struggle on many simple reasoning tasks such as arithmetic and parity. This raises the question of if and when Transformer models can learn the true…
Emergence is a fascinating property of large language models and neural networks more broadly: as models scale and train for longer, they sometimes develop new abilities in sudden ways. Despite initial studies, we still lack a comprehensive…
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…
Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…
Recent advances in reasoning domains with neural networks have primarily been enabled by a training recipe that optimizes Large Language Models, previously trained to predict the next-token in a sequence, with reinforcement learning…
In this paper, we investigate the inherent capabilities of transformer models in learning arithmetic algorithms, such as addition and parity. Through experiments and attention analysis, we identify a number of crucial factors for achieving…
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…
Scaling sequence length has become a critical demand in the era of large language models. However, existing methods struggle with either computational complexity or model expressivity, rendering the maximum sequence length restricted. To…
Transformer network architecture has proven effective in speech enhancement. However, as its core module, self-attention suffers from quadratic complexity, making it infeasible for training on long speech utterances. In practical scenarios,…
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…
There is a growing interest in the ability of neural networks to execute algorithmic tasks (e.g., arithmetic, summary statistics, and sorting). The goal of this work is to better understand the role of attention in Transformers for…
Training large language models to predict beyond their training context lengths has drawn much attention in recent years, yet the principles driving such behavior of length generalization remain underexplored. We propose a new theoretical…
Attention mechanism is contributing to the majority of recent advances in machine learning for natural language processing. Additionally, it results in an attention map that shows the proportional influence of each input in its decision.…