arXiv Machine Learning

Weave of Formal Thought

arXiv:2606. 25987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) attain remarkable surface fluency on code, yet they neither formally guarantee the syntactic validity of their output nor leverage the hierarchical structure defining the target language.

arXiv AI
Aug 18

ReLoop: Structured Modeling and Behavioral Verification for Reliable LLM-Based Optimization

arXiv:2602. 15983v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can translate natural language into optimization code, but silent failures pose a critical risk: code that executes and returns solver-feasible solutions may encode semantically incorrect formulations---a feasibility--correctness gap reaching 90 percentage points on compositional problems.

By Junbo Jacob Lian, Yujun Sun, Huiling Chen, Chaoyu Zhang, Hanzhang Qin, Chung-Piaw Teo
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Syntax Without Semantics: Teaching Large Language Models to Code in an Unseen Language

arXiv:2605. 15607v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve high pass rates on code generation benchmarks, yet whether they can transfer this ability to languages absent from pretraining remains poorly understood.

By Vinayshekhar Bannihatti Kumar, Disha Makhija, Manoj Ghuhan Arivazhagan, Rashmi Gangadharaiah
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Syntax vs. Semantics: How Transformers Learn Deep Dependencies

The paper investigates how transformers acquire deep semantic dependencies, proposing a mechanistic framework that frames learning as a competition between surface statistics and deep semantics. It identifies a "Gradient Starvation" effect that suppresses error signals for sparse semantic dependencies early in training, delaying structural reasoning until a sudden phase transition. The study also explains the success of Chain-of-Thought strategies and introduces a topology‑aligned contrastive objective that improves variable binding performance by more than twice the gain of standard fine‑tuning.

By Jiangrui Zhao, Xiaoting Du
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Self-Speculation for Faster Reasoning Models

arXiv:2608.20359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are deployed for increasingly complex tasks involving planning and multi-step decision making, but high-quality performanc...

By Ravisri Valluri, Tung Nguyen, Aditya Grover