arXiv:2604. 25800v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been shown to empirically improve Transformers' performance, and theoretically increase their expressivity to Turing completeness.
By Oliver Kraus, Yash Sarrof, Yuekun Yao, Alexander Koller, Michael Hahn
arXiv:2608. 09558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How expressive is prompting a transformer?
By Alexander Hsu, Rongjie Lai
The paper examines how to allocate attention heads and head dimensions across Transformer layers to balance expressivity and efficiency. It provides a mathematical analysis of early layers’ role in information extraction and characterizes the trade‑off between head count and dimension under a fixed parameter budget. The authors prove a saturation effect of softmax activations, showing that increasing head dimensions yields diminishing returns, especially for long sequences, and propose strategies for efficient parameter allocation across layers.
By Ruoxi Yu, Haotian Jiang, Jingpu Cheng, Penghao Yu, Qianxiao Li, Zhong Li
arXiv:2606. 19317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A longstanding goal of research on interpretable deep learning is to replace opaque neural computations with human-meaningful symbolic descriptions.
By Amiri Hayes, Belinda Li, Jacob Andreas
arXiv:2607. 17624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers are remarkably versatile and their design is largely consistent across a variety of applications.
By Damien Teney, Liangze Jiang, Hemanth Saratchandran, Simon Lucey
arXiv:2510. 25013v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability aims to reverse-engineer large language models (LLMs) into human-understandable computational circuits.
By Rabin Adhikari
arXiv:2606. 19697v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing popularity of \emph{reasoning} models -- language models that output a series of reasoning or thought tokens before producing an answer -- is justified, in part, by theoretical results showing that chain-of-thought (CoT) transformers can simulate Turing machines, and thus perform arbitrary computation.
By Yanhong Li, Anej Svete, Ashish Sabharwal, William Merrill
A longstanding goal of research on interpretable deep learning is to replace opaque neural computations with human-meaningful symbolic descriptions. In this paper, we propose an approach for approximating the behavior of components of deep networks with executable programs.
arXiv:2608.31067v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Learning generalizable algorithmic computations remains a challenge for neural networks, as reflected in persistent failures on compositional and lengt...
By Takuya Ito, Ruchir Puri, Murray Campbell, Parikshit Ram
arXiv:2606. 17522v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep neural networks are widely believed to derive their expressive power from their ability to form \textbf{hierarchical representations}, capturing progressively more abstract and compositional features across layers.
By Vinoth Nandakumar, Qiang Qu, Pramod Thebe, Sakshi Khachariya, Tongliang Liu
arXiv:2511.08577v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Improving the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), especially under parameter constraints, is crucial for real-world applicat...
By Tianyu Fu, Yichen You, Zekai Chen, Guohao Dai, Huazhong Yang, Yu Wang
The paper proves that deep residual self‑attention networks can universally interpolate between any two collections of sequences using only two fixed single‑head attention blocks with Gaussian‑initialized projections. The interpolation is achieved by varying the order, signs, and durations of these blocks, independent of the specific input and output sequences. The result holds for both continuous and finite depth, and the authors also extend the analysis to causal‑masked settings.
By Sibylle Marcotte, Joan Bruna