English
Related papers

Related papers: Context-Free Recognition with Transformers

200 papers

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Hongbo Li , Lingjie Duan , Yingbin Liang

Transformer-based large language models have achieved remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. However, they often struggle with seemingly easy tasks like arithmetic despite their vast capabilities. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Luyu Qiu , Jianing Li , Chi Su , Chen Jason Zhang , Lei Chen

Transformers have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing, but comprehending their internal mechanisms remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel geometric perspective that elucidates the inner…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Raul Molina

When large language models (LLMs) use in-context learning (ICL) to solve a new task, they must infer latent concepts from demonstration examples. This raises the question of whether and how transformers represent latent structures as part…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Guan Zhe Hong , Bhavya Vasudeva , Vatsal Sharan , Cyrus Rashtchian , Prabhakar Raghavan , Rina Panigrahy

Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yu Huang , Yuan Cheng , Yingbin Liang

We investigate the capability of a transformer pretrained on natural language to generalize to other modalities with minimal finetuning -- in particular, without finetuning of the self-attention and feedforward layers of the residual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Kevin Lu , Aditya Grover , Pieter Abbeel , Igor Mordatch

Transformers have exhibited exceptional capabilities in sequence modeling tasks, leveraging self-attention and in-context learning. Critical to this success are induction heads, attention circuits that enable copying tokens based on their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Francesco D'Angelo , Francesco Croce , Nicolas Flammarion

Error correction code is a major part of the communication physical layer, ensuring the reliable transfer of data over noisy channels. Recently, neural decoders were shown to outperform classical decoding techniques. However, the existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Yoni Choukroun , Lior Wolf

Recently, FO(C), the integration of C-Log with classical logic, was introduced as a knowledge representation language. Up to this point, no systems exist that perform inference on FO(C), and very little is known about properties of…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2014-04-28 Bart Bogaerts , Joost Vennekens , Marc Denecker , Jan Van den Bussche

Sequence modelling requires determining which past tokens are causally relevant from the context and their importance: a process inherent to the attention layers in transformers, yet whose underlying learned mechanisms remain poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Francesco D'Angelo , Nicolas Flammarion

Effective license plate recognition systems are required to be resilient to constant change, as new license plates are released into traffic daily. While Transformer-based networks excel in their recognition at first sight, we observe…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Florent Meyer , Laurent Guichard , Denis Coquenet , Guillaume Gravier , Yann Soullard , Bertrand Coüasnon

Many NLP models operate over sequences of subword tokens produced by hand-crafted tokenization rules and heuristic subword induction algorithms. A simple universal alternative is to represent every computerized text as a sequence of bytes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Uri Shaham , Omer Levy

Natural language processing systems often struggle with out-of-vocabulary (OOV) terms, which do not appear in training data. Blends, such as "innoventor", are one particularly challenging class of OOV, as they are formed by fusing together…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Yuval Pinter , Cassandra L. Jacobs , Jacob Eisenstein

Understanding the internal mechanisms of GPT-style transformers, particularly their capacity to perform in-context learning (ICL), is critical for advancing AI alignment and interpretability. In-context learning allows transformers to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Samarth Bhargav , Alexander Gu

Pre-trained language models have been shown to encode linguistic structures, e.g. dependency and constituency parse trees, in their embeddings while being trained on unsupervised loss functions like masked language modeling. Some doubts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Haoyu Zhao , Abhishek Panigrahi , Rong Ge , Sanjeev Arora

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

Despite their nearly universal adoption for large language models, the internal workings of transformers are not well understood. We aim to better understand the impact of removing or reorganizing information throughout the layers of a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Qi Sun , Marc Pickett , Aakash Kumar Nain , Llion Jones

A central question in multilingual language modeling is whether large language models (LLMs) develop a universal concept representation, disentangled from specific languages. In this paper, we address this question by analyzing latent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Clément Dumas , Chris Wendler , Veniamin Veselovsky , Giovanni Monea , Robert West

Recent multi-modal contrastive learning models have demonstrated the ability to learn an embedding space suitable for building strong vision classifiers, by leveraging the rich information in large-scale image-caption datasets. Our work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Yuhui Zhang , Jeff Z. HaoChen , Shih-Cheng Huang , Kuan-Chieh Wang , James Zou , Serena Yeung

We study how large language models (LLMs) reason about memorized knowledge through simple binary relations such as equality ($=$), inequality ($<$), and inclusion ($\subset$). Unlike in-context reasoning, the axioms (e.g., $a < b, b < c$)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Jonathan Shaki , Emanuele La Malfa , Michael Wooldridge , Sarit Kraus