English
Related papers

Related papers: Context-Free Recognition with Transformers

200 papers

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

Current Transformer-based natural language understanding (NLU) models heavily rely on dataset biases, while failing to handle real-world out-of-distribution (OOD) instances. Many methods have been proposed to deal with this issue, but they…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Xiaoyue Wang , Lijie Wang , Xin Liu , Suhang Wu , Jinsong Su , Hua Wu

While recurrent models have been effective in NLP tasks, their performance on context-free languages (CFLs) has been found to be quite weak. Given that CFLs are believed to capture important phenomena such as hierarchical structure in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Satwik Bhattamishra , Kabir Ahuja , Navin Goyal

Large Language Models (LLMs), powered by Transformers, have demonstrated human-like intelligence capabilities, yet their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper presents a novel framework for interpreting LLMs as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Phill Kyu Rhee

Self-supervised large language models have demonstrated the ability to perform Machine Translation (MT) via in-context learning, but little is known about where the model performs the task with respect to prompt instructions and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Suzanna Sia , David Mueller , Kevin Duh

Transformers have emerged as the dominant architecture in the field of deep learning, with a broad range of applications and remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. While not yet fully understood, ICL has already proved to be an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Arik Reuter , Tim G. J. Rudner , Vincent Fortuin , David Rügamer

Transformers have become the dominant architecture for natural language processing. Part of their success is owed to a remarkable capability known as in-context learning (ICL): they can acquire and apply novel associations solely from their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Tiberiu Musat , Tiago Pimentel , Lorenzo Noci , Alessandro Stolfo , Mrinmaya Sachan , Thomas Hofmann

Transformer architecture has become ubiquitous in the natural language processing field. To interpret the Transformer-based models, their attention patterns have been extensively analyzed. However, the Transformer architecture is not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Goro Kobayashi , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Sho Yokoi , Kentaro Inui

The geometric evolution of token representations in large language models (LLMs) presents a fundamental paradox: while human language inherently organizes semantic information in low-dimensional spaces ($\sim 10^1$ dimensions), modern LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Zhuo-Yang Song , Zeyu Li , Qing-Hong Cao , Ming-xing Luo , Hua Xing Zhu

Transformers have demonstrated impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, raising the question of whether they can serve as metalearners that adapt to new tasks using only a small number of in-context examples, without any further…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Roey Magen , Gal Vardi

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Ryan Campbell , Emma Guo , Evan Hu , Reya Vir , Ethan Hsiao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Steve Yadlowsky , Lyric Doshi , Nilesh Tripuraneni

State-of-the-art deep-learning-based approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP) are credited with various capabilities that involve reasoning with natural language texts. In this paper we carry out a large-scale empirical study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-11 Viktor Schlegel , Kamen V. Pavlov , Ian Pratt-Hartmann

Large language models based on the Transformer architecture have demonstrated impressive capabilities to learn in context. However, existing theoretical studies on how this phenomenon arises are limited to the dynamics of a single layer of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-04 Juno Kim , Taiji Suzuki

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have displayed remarkable creative prowess and emergence capabilities. Existing empirical studies have revealed a strong connection between these LLMs' impressive emergence abilities and their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Dake Bu , Wei Huang , Andi Han , Atsushi Nitanda , Taiji Suzuki , Qingfu Zhang , Hau-San Wong

The capabilities of transformer networks such as ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) have captured the world's attention. The crucial computational mechanism underlying their performance relies on transforming a complete input…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Lyle Muller , Patricia S. Churchland , Terrence J. Sejnowski

Transformers are extremely successful machine learning models whose mathematical properties remain poorly understood. Here, we rigorously characterize the behavior of transformers with hardmax self-attention and normalization sublayers as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Albert Alcalde , Giovanni Fantuzzi , Enrique Zuazua

Despite the extensive success of pretrained language models as encoders for building NLP systems, they haven't seen prominence as decoders for sequence generation tasks. We explore the question of whether these models can be adapted to be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-08-21 Nishant Subramani , Nivedita Suresh

Regular languages (RL) are the simplest family in Chomsky's hierarchy. Thanks to their simplicity they enjoy various nice algebraic and logic properties that have been successfully exploited in many application fields. Practically all of…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2017-05-03 Dino Mandrioli , Matteo Pradella

Chain-of-thought responses from language models improve performance across most benchmarks. However, it remains unclear to what extent these performance gains can be attributed to human-like task decomposition or simply the greater…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-25 Jacob Pfau , William Merrill , Samuel R. Bowman