Related papers: Is Grokking Worthwhile? Functional Analysis and Tr…
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been shown to empirically improve Transformers' performance, and theoretically increase their expressivity to Turing completeness. However, whether Transformers can learn to generalize to CoT traces longer than…
Pretraining on large, semantically rich datasets is key for developing language models. Surprisingly, recent studies have shown that even synthetic data, generated procedurally through simple semantic-free algorithms, can yield some of the…
Neural network models often generalize poorly to mismatched domains or distributions. In NLP, this issue arises in particular when models are expected to generalize compositionally, that is, to novel combinations of familiar words and…
Recent studies have uncovered intriguing phenomena in deep learning, such as grokking, double descent, and emergent abilities in large language models, which challenge human intuition and are crucial for a deeper understanding of neural…
Reasoning, the ability to logically draw conclusions from existing knowledge, is a hallmark of human. Together with perception, they constitute the two major themes of artificial intelligence. While deep learning has pushed the limit of…
Grokking refers to a delayed generalization following overfitting when optimizing artificial neural networks with gradient-based methods. In this work, we demonstrate that grokking can be induced by regularization, either explicit or…
Large language models (LLMs) have led to breakthroughs in language tasks, yet the internal mechanisms that enable their remarkable generalization and reasoning abilities remain opaque. This lack of transparency presents challenges such as…
Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand the inner workings of large neural networks by identifying circuits, or minimal subgraphs within the model that implement algorithms responsible for performing specific tasks. These circuits…
Recent studies on transformer-based language models show that they can answer questions by reasoning over knowledge provided as part of the context (i.e., in-context reasoning). However, since the available knowledge is often not filtered…
Several studies have reported the inability of Transformer models to generalize compositionally, a key type of generalization in many NLP tasks such as semantic parsing. In this paper we explore the design space of Transformer models…
A principled understanding of generalization in deep learning may require unifying disparate observations under a single conceptual framework. Previous work has studied \emph{grokking}, a training dynamic in which a sustained period of…
We present a theoretical explanation of the ``grokking'' phenomenon, where a model generalizes long after overfitting,for the originally-studied problem of modular addition. First, we show that early in gradient descent, when the ``kernel…
Recently, techniques such as explicit structured reasoning have demonstrated strong test-time scaling behavior by enforcing a separation between the model's internal "thinking" process and the final response. A key factor influencing answer…
Can Transformers predict new syllogisms by composing established ones? More generally, what type of targets can be learned by such models from scratch? Recent works show that Transformers can be Turing-complete in terms of expressivity, but…
Mechanistic interpretability research seeks to reveal the inner workings of large language models, yet most work focuses on classification or generative tasks rather than summarization. This paper presents an interpretability framework for…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown an impressive ability to perform tasks believed to require thought processes. When the model does not document an explicit thought process, it becomes difficult to understand the processes occurring…
Grokking, the unusual phenomenon for algorithmic datasets where generalization happens long after overfitting the training data, has remained elusive. We aim to understand grokking by analyzing the loss landscapes of neural networks,…
Reasoning is an important task for large language models (LLMs). Among all the reasoning paradigms, inductive reasoning is one of the fundamental types, which is characterized by its particular-to-general thinking process and the…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit a gap between their internal knowledge and their explicit linguistic outputs. In this report, we empirically investigate whether Looped Transformers (LTs)--architectures that increase computational…
We study the problem of length generalization (LG) in transformers: the ability of a model trained on shorter sequences to maintain performance when evaluated on much longer, previously unseen inputs. Prior work by Huang et al. (2025)…