Related papers: Transformers Linearly Represent Highly Structured …

Representation learning for text via pretraining a language model on a large corpus has become a standard starting point for building NLP systems. This approach stands in contrast to autoencoders, also trained on raw text, but with the…

We investigate whether transformers use their depth adaptively across tasks of increasing difficulty. Using a controlled multi-hop relational reasoning task based on family stories, where difficulty is determined by the number of…

Many complicated real-world tasks can be broken down into smaller, more manageable parts, and planning with prior knowledge extracted from these simplified pieces is crucial for humans to make accurate decisions. However, replicating this…

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…

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…

Attention-based transformers have been remarkably successful at modeling generative processes across various domains and modalities. In this paper, we study the behavior of transformers on data drawn from \kth Markov processes, where the…

Transformers generate valid and diverse chemical structures, but little is known about the mechanisms that enable these models to capture the rules of molecular representation. We present a mechanistic analysis of autoregressive…

Transformer based language models exhibit intelligent behaviors such as understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, acquiring knowledge, reasoning, planning, reflecting and using tools. This paper explores how their underlying…

Transformer language models are neural networks used for a wide variety of tasks concerning natural language, including some that also require logical reasoning. However, a transformer model may easily learn spurious patterns in the data,…

Transformers have achieved great success across a wide range of applications, yet the theoretical foundations underlying their success remain largely unexplored. To demystify the strong capacities of transformers applied to versatile…

Transformers have been successfully applied to sequential, auto-regressive tasks despite being feedforward networks. Unlike recurrent neural networks, Transformers use attention to capture temporal relations while processing input tokens in…

The incredible success of transformers on sequence modeling tasks can be largely attributed to the self-attention mechanism, which allows information to be transferred between different parts of a sequence. Self-attention allows…

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in language modeling tasks. However, the reasons behind their tremendous success are still unclear. In this paper, towards a better understanding, we train a Transformer model on a…

Recent large language models have demonstrated relevant capabilities in solving problems that require logical reasoning; however, the corresponding internal mechanisms remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we show that a small language…

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized the field of sequence modeling and underpins the recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs). However, a comprehensive mathematical theory that explains its structure and operations…

We formally study the logical reasoning capabilities of decoder-only Transformers in the context of the boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem. First, we prove by construction that decoder-only Transformers can decide 3-SAT, in a non-uniform…

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…

Understanding where transformer language models encode psychologically meaningful aspects of meaning is essential for both theory and practice. We conduct a systematic layer-wise probing study of 58 psycholinguistic features across 10…

To improve the explainability of leading Transformer networks used in NLP, it is important to tease apart genuine symbolic rules from merely associative input-output patterns. However, we identify several inconsistencies in how…

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable performance in natural language processing and related domains, as they largely focus on sequential, autoregressive next-token prediction tasks. Yet, they struggle in logical reasoning, not…