English
Related papers

Related papers: Transformers Provably Learn Chain-of-Thought Reaso…

200 papers

While large reasoning models have shown remarkable ability to generate long chains-of-thought (CoTs) in English, we still lack understanding of how these long-form reasoning abilities transfer to the vast majority of the world's languages.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Josh Barua , Seun Eisape , Kayo Yin , Alane Suhr

Understanding the fundamental mechanism behind the success of transformer networks is still an open problem in the deep learning literature. Although their remarkable performance has been mostly attributed to the self-attention mechanism,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Tolga Ergen , Behnam Neyshabur , Harsh Mehta

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Tiberiu Musat

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Yen-Che Hsiao , Abhishek Dutta

Transformer-based models excel in various tasks but their generalization capabilities, especially in arithmetic reasoning, remain incompletely understood. Arithmetic tasks provide a controlled framework to explore these capabilities, yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Xingcheng Xu , Zibo Zhao , Haipeng Zhang , Yanqing Yang

Autoregressive (AR) Transformer-based sequence models are known to have difficulty generalizing to sequences longer than those seen during training. When applied to text-to-speech (TTS), these models tend to drop or repeat words or produce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Eric Battenberg , RJ Skerry-Ryan , Daisy Stanton , Soroosh Mariooryad , Matt Shannon , Julian Salazar , David Kao

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), especially when combined with reinforcement learning (RL) based post-training methods. While longer reasoning traces can improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Qinhang Wu , Sen Lin , Ming Zhang , Yingbin Liang , Ness B. Shroff

Recent impressive results from large reasoning models have been interpreted as a triumph of Chain of Thought (CoT), and especially of the process of training on CoTs sampled from base LLMs in order to help find new reasoning patterns. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Karthik Valmeekam , Vardhan Palod , Kaya Stechly , Atharva Gundawar , Subbarao Kambhampati

Humans exhibit remarkable compositional reasoning by integrating knowledge from various sources. For example, if someone learns ( B = f(A) ) from one source and ( C = g(B) ) from another, they can deduce ( C=g(B)=g(f(A)) ) even without…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Yutong Yin , Zhaoran Wang

Recent advancements in cognitive science and multi-round reasoning techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs) suggest that iterative thinking processes improve problem-solving performance in complex tasks. Inspired by this, approaches like…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Chenhui Xu , Dancheng Liu , Jiajie Li , Amir Nassereldine , Zhaohui Li , Jinjun Xiong

Scaling inference compute enhances reasoning in large language models (LLMs), with long chains-of-thought (CoTs) enabling strategies like backtracking and error correction. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial method for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Edward Yeo , Yuxuan Tong , Morry Niu , Graham Neubig , Xiang Yue

Test-time scaling improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by allocating extra compute to generate longer Chains-of-Thoughts (CoTs). This enables models to tackle more complex problem by breaking them down into…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Adel Javanmard , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Vahab Mirrokni

This paper investigates the limitations of transformers for entity-tracking tasks in large language models. We identify a theoretical constraint, showing that transformers require at least $\log_2 (n+1)$ layers to handle entity tracking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Erwan Fagnou , Paul Caillon , Blaise Delattre , Alexandre Allauzen

Standard Transformers excel at semantic modeling but struggle with rigid sequential logic and state tracking. Theoretical work establishes that self-attention is limited to $\AC^0$ (under hard attention) or $\TC^0$ (under soft attention),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Mehryar Mohri

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Jannik Brinkmann , Abhay Sheshadri , Victor Levoso , Paul Swoboda , Christian Bartelt

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful tool for enhancing the problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the theoretical foundations of learning from CoT data remain underdeveloped, and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Shai Shalev-Shwartz , Amnon Shashua

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting helps Large Language Models (LLMs) solve difficult problems, but very long traces often slow or even degrade performance on fast, intuitive "System-1" tasks. We introduce Connector-Aware Compact CoT…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Sunguk Choi , Yonghoon Kwon , Heondeuk Lee

Reasoning is a fundamental capability of AI agents. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities to perform reasoning tasks. However, numerous evaluations of the reasoning capabilities of LLMs have also showed some…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Changnan Xiao , Bing Liu

Standard Transformers have a fixed computational depth, fundamentally limiting their ability to generalize to tasks requiring variable-depth reasoning, such as multi-hop graph traversal or nested logic. We propose a depth-recurrent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Hung-Hsuan Chen

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances the problem-solving ability of large language models (LLMs) but leads to substantial inference overhead, limiting deployment in resource-constrained settings. This paper investigates efficient CoT…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ziqian Bi , Kaijie Chen , Tianyang Wang , Junfeng Hao , Benji Peng , Xinyuan Song