arXiv AI

Parity, Sensitivity, and Transformers

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Legible-by-Construction: Attention and End-to-End Transformers

arXiv:2607. 04319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A companion paper showed that a transformer's feed-forward layer can be rebuilt from explicit fuzzy set operations - intersection, set-difference, and a self-forgetting sequence quantifier - so its hidden units read as named logical operators at no cost to language-model quality.

By Mark Oskin
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

Universal interpolation for deep residual self-attention networks

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 27

Indexing: the Beginning and the End

arXiv:2607. 22361v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study information bottlenecks in modern deep-learning architectures -- RNNs, softmax transformers, linear-attention transformers and state-space models -- through the lens of the indexing primitive.

By Alexander Kozachinskiy, Vicente Opazo, Felipe Urrutia
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 15

Rational Transductors

arXiv:2602.07599v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard Transformers excel at semantic modeling but struggle with rigid sequential logic and state tracking. Theoretical work establishes that...

By Mehryar Mohri
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

Performance-Efficiency Tradeoffs in Transformers: An Approximation Theory Perspective

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 AI
Jun 29

The Context-Ready Transformer

arXiv:2606. 27538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the context-ready transformer, a new recurrent neural network architecture built from a D-layer transformer block that pre-contextualizes each token before it enters the block.

By Mahesh Godavarti
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Recurrent Looped Transformer

The Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT) divides its layers into a parallel causal encoder and a recurrent decoder, allowing the computation path to grow with sequence length while keeping a fixed per-token cost. Experiments on six algorithmic tasks show that RLT outperforms a standard eight‑layer Transformer, achieving perfect generalization on parity up to 256 bits and high accuracy on swap‑based permutation tracking and modular arithmetic beyond training lengths. Ablation studies confirm that the recurrent feedback is essential for these gains, with chunked updates preserving performance on parity but reducing accuracy on permutation tracking.

By Yifan Zhang, Jichen Feng, Shihan Qin