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

For a given base class of sequence-to-next-token generators, we consider learning prompt-to-answer mappings obtained by iterating a fixed, time-invariant generator for multiple steps, thus generating a chain-of-thought, and then taking the…

Phase transitions mark qualitative reorganizations of collective behavior, yet identifying their boundaries remains challenging whenever analytic solutions are absent and conventional simulations fail. Here we introduce learnability as a…

Transformers evaluated in a single, fixed-depth pass are provably limited in expressive power to the constant-depth circuit class TC0. Running a Transformer autoregressively removes that ceiling -- first in next-token prediction and, more…

Backtracking search underlies classical constraint solvers, planners, and theorem provers. Recent transformer-based reasoning systems explore search trees over their own intermediate steps. A common training recipe fits an autoregressive…

Language models are increasingly capable, yet still fail at a seemingly simple task of multi-digit multiplication. In this work, we study why, by reverse-engineering a model that successfully learns multiplication via \emph{implicit…

Learning algorithms become more powerful, often at the cost of increased complexity. In response, the demand for algorithms to be transparent is growing. In NLP tasks, attention distributions learned by attention-based deep learning models…

A prevailing narrative in LLM post-training holds that supervised finetuning (SFT) memorizes while reinforcement learning (RL) generalizes. We revisit this claim for reasoning SFT with long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision and find that…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become the standard paradigm for enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex problems. However, recent studies reveal a sharp performance drop in reasoning hop generalization scenarios, where…

Transformer-based approaches have been successfully used to obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on natural language processing (NLP) tasks with semi-structured tables. These model architectures are typically deep, resulting in slow training…

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances language models' performance but often leads to inefficient "overthinking" on simple problems. We identify that existing approaches directly penalizing reasoning length fail to account for varying…

Recent advances in chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting have enabled large language models (LLMs) to perform multi-step reasoning. However, the explainability of such reasoning remains limited, with prior work primarily focusing on local…

Chain of Thought (CoT) is significant in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the correlation between the effectiveness of CoT and the length of reasoning steps in prompts remains largely unknown. To…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has shown promise in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) on text-attributed graphs (TAGs). This work reframes CoT-based graph learning through the principle of clustering as…

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning has demonstrated remarkable deep reasoning capabilities in both large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, its reliability is often undermined by the accumulation of…

We investigate whether transformers use their depth adaptively across tasks of increasing difficulty. Using a controlled multi-hop relational reasoning task based on family stories, where difficulty is determined by the number of…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been widely recognized for its ability to enhance reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, our study reveals a surprising contradiction to this prevailing perspective within the…

Large language models (LLMs) often fail to learn effective long chain-of-thought (Long CoT) reasoning from human or non-Long-CoT LLMs imitation. To understand this, we propose that effective and learnable Long CoT trajectories feature…

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…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is a critical capability for large language models (LLMs), enabling them to tackle com- plex multi-step tasks. While base LLMs, pre-trained on general text corpora, often struggle with reasoning due to a…

Latent reasoning via continuous chain-of-thoughts (Latent CoT) has emerged as a promising alternative to discrete CoT reasoning. Operating in continuous space increases expressivity and has been hypothesized to enable superposition: the…