Related papers: Critical Windows of Complexity Control: When Trans…
Transformers have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, yet their performance on compositional problems remains a subject of debate. In this study, we investigate the internal mechanisms underlying Transformers'…
Transformers trained on modular arithmetic exhibit sharp transitions between memorization, generalization, and collapse. We show that weight decay acts as a scalar empirical control parameter for these regimes, and introduce two cheap…
Transformers have shown impressive capabilities across various tasks, but their performance on compositional problems remains a topic of debate. In this work, we investigate the mechanisms of how transformers behave on unseen compositional…
Mechanistic interpretability has transformed the analysis of transformer circuits by decomposing model behavior into competing algorithms, identifying phase transitions during training, and deriving closed-form predictions for when and why…
When writing programs, people have the ability to tackle a new complex task by decomposing it into smaller and more familiar subtasks. While it is difficult to measure whether neural program synthesis methods have similar capabilities, what…
Computers are deterministic dynamical systems (CHAOS 19:033124, 2009). Among other things, that implies that one should be able to use deterministic forecast rules to predict their behavior. That statement is sometimes-but not always-true.…
Humans exhibit remarkable compositional reasoning by integrating knowledge from various sources. For example, if someone learns ( B = f(A) ) from one source and ( C = g(B) ) from another, they can deduce ( C=g(B)=g(f(A)) ) even without…
We investigate the integration of human-like working memory constraints into the Transformer architecture and implement several cognitively inspired attention variants, including fixed-width windows based and temporal decay based attention…
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…
While there are many studies on weight regularization, the study on structure regularization is rare. Many existing systems on structured prediction focus on increasing the level of structural dependencies within the model. However, this…
Compression has been a critical lens to understand the success of Transformers. In the past, we have typically taken the target distribution as a criterion to evaluate a model's compression performance. Nevertheless,it often remains…
We study the approximation capabilities, convergence speeds and on-convergence behaviors of transformers trained on in-context recall tasks -- which requires to recognize the \emph{positional} association between a pair of tokens from…
Memorization in language models is widely studied but remains difficult to isolate and control. Understanding when and what models memorize is essential for explaining their predictions, yet existing approaches are post-hoc: they can detect…
The ability to reason lies at the core of artificial intelligence (AI), and challenging problems usually call for deeper and longer reasoning to tackle. A crucial question about AI reasoning is whether models can extrapolate learned…
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…
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…
The transformer architecture is central to the success of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), in part due to its surprising ability to perform a wide range of tasks - including mathematical reasoning, memorization, and retrieval - using…
Systematic compositionality is an essential mechanism in human language, allowing the recombination of known parts to create novel expressions. However, existing neural models have been shown to lack this basic ability in learning symbolic…
Transformers can under some circumstances generalize to novel problem instances whose constituent parts might have been encountered during training, but whose compositions have not. What mechanisms underlie this ability for compositional…
Standard Transformers excel at semantic modeling but struggle with rigid sequential logic and state tracking. Theoretical work establishes that self-attention is limited to $\AC^0$ (under hard attention) or $\TC^0$ (under soft attention),…