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In transfer learning, the learner leverages auxiliary data to improve generalization on a main task. However, the precise theoretical understanding of when and how auxiliary data help remains incomplete. We provide new insights on this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Meitong Liu , Christopher Jung , Rui Li , Xue Feng , Han Zhao

Transformers exhibit a notable property of \emph{size generalization}, demonstrating an ability to extrapolate from smaller token sets to significantly longer ones. This behavior has been documented across diverse applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Anastasiia Alokhina , Pan Li

Recent theoretical results show transformers cannot express sequential reasoning problems over long inputs, intuitively because their computational depth is bounded. However, prior work treats the depth as a constant, leaving it unclear to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 William Merrill , Ashish Sabharwal

Length generalization, the ability to solve problems longer than those seen during training, remains a critical challenge for large language models (LLMs). Previous work modifies positional encodings (PEs) and data formats to improve length…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Yi Hu , Shijia Kang , Haotong Yang , Haotian Xu , Muhan Zhang

In-context learning enables transformer models to generalize to new tasks based solely on input prompts, without any need for weight updates. However, existing training paradigms typically rely on large, unstructured datasets that are…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Yuxuan Li , James L. McClelland

The capacity to generalize beyond the range of training data is a pivotal challenge, often synonymous with a model's utility and robustness. This study investigates the comparative abilities of traditional machine learning (ML) models and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Yong Yi Bay , Kathleen A. Yearick

Large language models (LLMs) based on the Transformer have demonstrated strong performance across diverse tasks. However, current models still exhibit substantial limitations in out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization compared with humans.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Huanyu Liu , Ge Li , Yihong Dong , Sihan Wu , Peixu Wang , Sihao Cheng , Taozhi Chen , Kechi Zhang , Hao Zhu , Tongxuan Liu

This research delves deeply into Meta Reinforcement Learning (Meta RL) through a exploration focusing on defining generalization limits and ensuring convergence. By employing a approach this article introduces an innovative theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Cangqing Wang , Mingxiu Sui , Dan Sun , Zecheng Zhang , Yan Zhou

This paper explores the impact of extending input lengths on the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite LLMs advancements in recent times, their performance consistency across different input lengths is not well understood.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Mosh Levy , Alon Jacoby , Yoav Goldberg

Aimed at explaining the surprisingly good generalization behavior of overparameterized deep networks, recent works have developed a variety of generalization bounds for deep learning, all based on the fundamental learning-theoretic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Vaishnavh Nagarajan , J. Zico Kolter

In this paper, we introduce various covering number bounds for linear function classes, each subject to different constraints on input and matrix norms. These bounds are contingent on the rank of each class of matrices. We then apply these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-16 Lan V. Truong

Large-scale transformers achieve impressive results on program synthesis benchmarks, yet their true generalization capabilities remain obscured by data contamination and opaque training corpora. To rigorously assess whether models are truly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Henrik Voigt , Michael Habeck , Joachim Giesen

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-12 Jackson Petty , Sjoerd van Steenkiste , Ishita Dasgupta , Fei Sha , Dan Garrette , Tal Linzen

When training deep neural networks, a model's generalization error is often observed to follow a power scaling law dependent both on the model size and the data size. Perhaps the best known example of such scaling laws are for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Alex Havrilla , Wenjing Liao

In Transformers, Position Embeddings (PEs) significantly influence Length Generalization (LG) performance, yet their fundamental role remains unclear. In this work, we investigate the limitations and capabilities of PEs in achieving LG. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Yang Chen , Yitao Liang , Zhouchen Lin

Transformers struggle with length generalisation, displaying poor performance even on basic tasks. We test whether these limitations can be explained through two key failures of the self-attention mechanism. The first is the inability to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Mattia Opper , Roland Fernandez , Paul Smolensky , Jianfeng Gao

Despite their outstanding performance, large language models (LLMs) suffer notorious flaws related to their preference for simple, surface-level textual relations over full semantic complexity of the problem. This proposal investigates a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Michal Štefánik

This paper presents a novel information-theoretic perspective on generalization in machine learning by framing the learning problem within the context of lossy compression and applying finite blocklength analysis. In our approach, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Kosuke Sugiyama , Masato Uchida

Large Language Models demonstrate remarkable mathematical capabilities but at the same time struggle with abstract reasoning and planning. In this study, we explore whether Transformers can learn to abstract and generalize the rules…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Mikhail Burtsev