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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)…
Imitation learning holds the promise of equipping robots with versatile skills by learning from expert demonstrations. However, policies trained on finite datasets often struggle to generalize beyond the training distribution. In this work,…
A large language model's (LLM's) out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation ability is crucial to its deployment. Previous work assessing LLMs' generalisation performance, however, typically focuses on a single out-of-distribution dataset.…
A major challenge for transformers is generalizing to sequences longer than those observed during training. While previous works have empirically shown that transformers can either succeed or fail at length generalization depending on the…
Algorithmic generalization in machine learning refers to the ability to learn the underlying algorithm that generates data in a way that generalizes out-of-distribution. This is generally considered a difficult task for most machine…
Transformers have impressive generalization capabilities on tasks with a fixed context length. However, they fail to generalize to sequences of arbitrary length, even for seemingly simple tasks such as duplicating a string. Moreover, simply…
This study aims to understand how statistical biases affect the model's ability to generalize to in-distribution and out-of-distribution data on algorithmic tasks. Prior research indicates that transformers may inadvertently learn to rely…
Periodic or quasi-periodic phenomena reveal intrinsic characteristics in various natural processes, such as weather patterns, movement behaviors, traffic flows, and biological signals. Given that these phenomena span multiple modalities,…
Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…
Transformer language models have demonstrated impressive generalization capabilities in natural language domains, yet we lack a fine-grained understanding of how such generalization arises. In this paper, we investigate length…
Symbolic regression algorithms search a space of mathematical expressions for formulas that explain given data. Transformer-based models have emerged as a promising, scalable approach shifting the expensive combinatorial search to a…
Transformers often struggle with length generalization, meaning they fail to generalize to sequences longer than those encountered during training. While arithmetic tasks are commonly used to study length generalization, certain tasks are…
Empirical studies have identified a range of learnability biases and limitations of transformers, such as a persistent difficulty in learning to compute simple formal languages such as PARITY, and a bias towards low-degree functions.…
Out-of-distribution (O.O.D.) generalization remains to be a key challenge for real-world machine learning systems. We describe a method for O.O.D. generalization that, through training, encourages models to only preserve features in the…
The advent of the Transformer has led to the development of large language models (LLM), which appear to demonstrate human-like capabilities. To assess the generality of this class of models and a variety of other base neural network…
Given the intractably large size of the space of proofs, any model that is capable of general deductive reasoning must generalize to proofs of greater complexity. Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) possess some…
Although pretrained Transformers such as BERT achieve high accuracy on in-distribution examples, do they generalize to new distributions? We systematically measure out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization for seven NLP datasets by…
In-context learning, a capability that enables a model to learn from input examples on the fly without necessitating weight updates, is a defining characteristic of large language models. In this work, we follow the setting proposed in…
Chess is a canonical example of a task that requires rigorous reasoning and long-term planning. Modern decision Transformers - trained similarly to LLMs - are able to learn competent gameplay, but it is unclear to what extent they truly…
We find limits to the Transformer architecture for language modeling and show it has a universal prediction property in an information-theoretic sense. We further analyze performance in non-asymptotic data regimes to understand the role of…