Related papers: Layer Specialization Underlying Compositional Reas…
Transformers have demonstrated remarkable performance in natural language processing and related domains, as they largely focus on sequential, autoregressive next-token prediction tasks. Yet, they struggle in logical reasoning, not…
When trained on language data, do transformers learn some arbitrary computation that utilizes the full capacity of the architecture or do they learn a simpler, tree-like computation, hypothesized to underlie compositional meaning systems…
Natural language exhibits patterns of hierarchically governed dependencies, in which relations between words are sensitive to syntactic structure rather than linear ordering. While re-current network models often fail to generalize in a…
According to the principle of compositional generalization, the meaning of a complex expression can be understood as a function of the meaning of its parts and of how they are combined. This principle is crucial for human language…
In-context learning (ICL) is a type of prompting where a transformer model operates on a sequence of (input, output) examples and performs inference on-the-fly. In this work, we formalize in-context learning as an algorithm learning problem…
To process novel sentences, language models (LMs) must generalize compositionally -- combine familiar elements in new ways. What aspects of a model's structure promote compositional generalization? Focusing on transformers, we test the…
The ability to reason with multiple hierarchical structures is an attractive and desirable property of sequential inductive biases for natural language processing. Do the state-of-the-art Transformers and LSTM architectures implicitly…
Because language is creative, any reasonable language model must generalize, deciding what to say in novel contexts by using information from similar contexts. But what about contexts that are not novel but merely infrequent? In…
The transformer architecture, which processes sequences of input tokens to produce outputs for query tokens, has revolutionized numerous areas of machine learning. A defining feature of transformers is their ability to perform previously…
Systematic generalization refers to the capacity to understand and generate novel combinations from known components. Despite recent progress by large language models (LLMs) across various domains, these models often fail to extend their…
In-context learning (ICL) has revolutionized the capabilities of transformer models in NLP. In our project, we extend the understanding of the mechanisms underpinning ICL by exploring whether transformers can learn from sequential,…
In-context learning, a capability that enables a model to learn from input examples on the fly without necessitating weight updates, is a defining characteristic of large language models. In this work, we follow the setting proposed in…
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…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) have initiated a paradigm shift in transfer learning. In contrast to the classic pretraining-then-finetuning procedure, in order to use LLMs for downstream prediction tasks, one only needs to provide a few…
In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks without weight updates by learning from demonstration sequences. While ICL shows strong empirical performance, its internal representational mechanisms are…
Despite impressive performance on language modelling and complex reasoning tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) fall short on the same tasks in uncommon settings or with distribution shifts, exhibiting a lack of generalisation ability. By…
Transformer models, notably large language models (LLMs), have the remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) -- to perform new tasks when prompted with unseen input-output examples without any explicit model training. In this…
Transformers have supplanted recurrent models in a large number of NLP tasks. However, the differences in their abilities to model different syntactic properties remain largely unknown. Past works suggest that LSTMs generalize very well on…
Training autonomous agents that can learn new tasks from only a handful of demonstrations is a long-standing problem in machine learning. Recently, transformers have been shown to learn new language or vision tasks without any weight…