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This paper proposes an adaptive neural-compilation framework to address the problem of efficient program learning. Traditional code optimisation strategies used in compilers are based on applying pre-specified set of transformations that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Rudy Bunel , Alban Desmaison , Pushmeet Kohli , Philip H. S. Torr , M. Pawan Kumar

The Universal Turing Machine (TM) is a model for VonNeumann computers --- general-purpose computers. A human brain can inside-skull-automatically learn a universal TM so that he acts as a general-purpose computer and writes a computer…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-03-28 Juyang Weng

Mixture models arise in many regression problems, but most methods have seen limited adoption partly due to these algorithms' highly-tailored and model-specific nature. On the other hand, transformers are flexible, neural sequence models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-15 Reese Pathak , Rajat Sen , Weihao Kong , Abhimanyu Das

Analogical reasoning is a hallmark of human intelligence, enabling us to solve new problems by transferring knowledge from one situation to another. Yet, developing artificial intelligence systems capable of robust human-like analogical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Philipp Hellwig , Willem Zuidema , Claire E. Stevenson , Martha Lewis

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

Neural networks have in recent years shown promise for helping software engineers write programs and even formally verify them. While semantic information plays a crucial part in these processes, it remains unclear to what degree popular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Shizhuo Dylan Zhang , Curt Tigges , Stella Biderman , Maxim Raginsky , Talia Ringer

Previous work on the learnability of transformers \textemdash\ focused primarily on examining their ability to approximate specific algorithmic patterns through training \textemdash\ has largely been data-driven, offering only probabilistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Debanjan Dutta , Anish Chakrabarty , Faizanuddin Ansari , Swagatam Das

Transformers are deep architectures that define "in-context mappings" which enable predicting new tokens based on a given set of tokens (such as a prompt in NLP applications or a set of patches for a vision transformer). In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Takashi Furuya , Maarten V. de Hoop , Gabriel Peyré

We propose the neural programmer-interpreter (NPI): a recurrent and compositional neural network that learns to represent and execute programs. NPI has three learnable components: a task-agnostic recurrent core, a persistent key-value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-01 Scott Reed , Nando de Freitas

Transformers serve as the foundational architecture for large language and video generation models, such as GPT, BERT, SORA and their successors. Empirical studies have demonstrated that real-world data and learning tasks exhibit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhaiming Shen , Alex Havrilla , Rongjie Lai , Alexander Cloninger , Wenjing Liao

We prove that any Turing machine running on inputs of arbitrary length can be simulated by a constant bit-size transformer, as long as the context window is sufficiently long. This improves previous works, which require scaling up either…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Qian Li , Yuyi Wang

Programs, consisting of semantic and structural information, play an important role in the communication between humans and agents. Towards learning general program executors to unify perception, reasoning, and decision making, we formulate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Zelin Zhao , Karan Samel , Binghong Chen , Le Song

A remarkable new definition of a self-delimiting universal Turing machine is presented that is easy to program and runs very quickly. This provides a new foundation for algorithmic information theory. This new universal Turing machine is…

chao-dyn · Physics 2008-02-03 G. J. Chaitin

In this work, we introduce a self-supervised behavior cloning transformer for text games, which are challenging benchmarks for multi-step reasoning in virtual environments. Traditionally, Behavior Cloning Transformers excel in such tasks…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Ruoyao Wang , Peter Jansen

Probabilistic Transformer (PT), a white-box probabilistic model for contextual word representation, has demonstrated substantial similarity to standard Transformers in both computational structure and downstream task performance on small…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Penghao Kuang , Haoyi Wu , Kewei Tu

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

We show that transformer-based large language models are computationally universal when augmented with an external memory. Any deterministic language model that conditions on strings of bounded length is equivalent to a finite automaton,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-01-12 Dale Schuurmans

Transformers have proven highly effective across various applications, especially in handling sequential data such as natural languages and time series. However, transformer models often lack clear interpretability, and the success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Wei Shi , Yuan Cao

We study Transformers on the task \emph{program trace generation} (PTG), where models produce step-by-step execution traces for synthetic programs. Unlike existing algorithmic problems, PTG externalizes reasoning through long traces where…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Simeng Sun

Multiple domains like vision, natural language, and audio are witnessing tremendous progress by leveraging Transformers for large scale pre-training followed by task specific fine tuning. In contrast, in robotics we primarily train a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-23 Agrim Gupta , Linxi Fan , Surya Ganguli , Li Fei-Fei