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In many real-world scenarios, data to train machine learning models becomes available over time. Unfortunately, these models struggle to continually learn new concepts without forgetting what has been learnt in the past. This phenomenon is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Beyza Ermis , Giovanni Zappella , Martin Wistuba , Aditya Rawal , Cedric Archambeau

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-18 Nuri Mert Vural , Alberto Bietti , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Denny Wu

We study implicit reasoning, i.e. the ability to combine knowledge or rules within a single forward pass. While transformer-based large language models store substantial factual knowledge and rules, they often fail to compose this knowledge…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Harsh Kohli , Srinivasan Parthasarathy , Huan Sun , Yuekun Yao

Is analogical reasoning a task that must be learned to solve from scratch by applying deep learning models to massive numbers of reasoning problems? Or are analogies solved by computing similarities between structured representations of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Nicholas Ichien , Qing Liu , Shuhao Fu , Keith J. Holyoak , Alan Yuille , Hongjing Lu

Pre-trained large language models based on Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) abilities. With just a few demonstration examples, the models can implement new tasks without any parameter updates. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Ruifeng Ren , Yong Liu

Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 utilize the powerful in-context learning (ICL) capability of Transformer architecture to learn on the fly from limited examples. While ICL underpins many LLM applications, its full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Xingxuan Zhang , Haoran Wang , Jiansheng Li , Yuan Xue , Shikai Guan , Renzhe Xu , Hao Zou , Han Yu , Peng Cui

Many NLP applications require models to be interpretable. However, many successful neural architectures, including transformers, still lack effective interpretation methods. A possible solution could rely on building explanations from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Federico Ruggeri , Marco Lippi , Paolo Torroni

Machine learning models, and in particular language models, are being applied to various tasks that require reasoning. While such models are good at capturing patterns their ability to reason in a trustable and controlled manner is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Kristoffer Æsøy , Ana Ozaki

Transformers have the capacity to act as supervised learning algorithms: by properly encoding a set of labeled training ("in-context") examples and an unlabeled test example into an input sequence of vectors of the same dimension, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Spencer Frei , Gal Vardi

The ability to learn and compose functions is foundational to efficient learning and reasoning in humans, enabling flexible generalizations such as creating new dishes from known cooking processes. Beyond sequential chaining of functions,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-20 Yanli Zhou , Brenden M. Lake , Adina Williams

Transformers have shown a remarkable ability for in-context learning (ICL), making predictions based on contextual examples. However, while theoretical analyses have explored this prediction capability, the nature of the inferred context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Fei Lu , Yue Yu

When trained on language data, do transformers learn some arbitrary computation that utilizes the full capacity of the architecture or do they learn a simpler, tree-like computation, hypothesized to underlie compositional meaning systems…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-07 Shikhar Murty , Pratyusha Sharma , Jacob Andreas , Christopher D. Manning

Transformers, the backbone of modern large language models (LLMs), face inherent architectural limitations that impede their reasoning capabilities. Unlike recurrent networks, Transformers lack recurrent connections, confining them to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Xiang Zhang , Juntai Cao , Chenyu You

What if artificial intelligence could not only solve problems for which it was trained but also learn to teach itself to solve new problems (i.e., meta-learn)? In this study, we demonstrate that a pre-trained transformer fine-tuned with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Micah Rentschler , Jesse Roberts

Cross-domain analogical reasoning is a core creative ability that can be challenging for humans. Recent work has shown some proofs-of concept of Large language Models' (LLMs) ability to generate cross-domain analogies. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Zijian Ding , Arvind Srinivasan , Stephen MacNeil , Joel Chan

In-context learning enables transformer models to generalize to new tasks based solely on input prompts, without any need for weight updates. However, existing training paradigms typically rely on large, unstructured datasets that are…

Large language models exhibit sophisticated capabilities, yet understanding how they work internally remains a central challenge. A fundamental obstacle is that training selects for behavior, not circuitry, so many weight configurations can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Joshua S. Schiffman

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

We propose a synthetic reasoning task, LEGO (Learning Equality and Group Operations), that encapsulates the problem of following a chain of reasoning, and we study how the Transformer architectures learn this task. We pay special attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Yi Zhang , Arturs Backurs , Sébastien Bubeck , Ronen Eldan , Suriya Gunasekar , Tal Wagner

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