arXiv Machine Learning

Deep networks learn to parse uniform-depth context-free languages from local statistics

arXiv:2602. 06065v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding how the structure of language can be learned from sentences alone is a central question in both cognitive science and machine learning.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 17

An expressivity analysis of hierarchical modelling in deep transformers via bounded-depth grammars

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 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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 16

An expressivity analysis of hierarchical modelling in deep transformers via bounded-depth grammars

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. In language modeling, \textbf{transformers} have emerged as the dominant architecture, with early layers capturing local syntactic patterns and later layers encoding more complex clause-level dependencies.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

Language models suffer from a curse of ambiguity

arXiv:2608. 15448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly rely on sampling as a driver of their own improvement, making the fidelity of their learned distributions more critical than ever.

By Nicolas Zucchet, Hyun Dong Lee, Scott Linderman
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 22

Sublinearly Structured Deep Neural Networks Achieve Feature Learning Consistency for Compositional Functions

Over the past decade, deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success on complex machine-learning tasks, yet the theoretical foundations of their performance remain incomplete. From a statistical viewpoint, a natural question is: can DNNs attain feature-learning and prediction consistency comparable to that of classical models?

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

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.

By Alexandre Bouayad
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Lens: Bringing the Right Semantic Perspective into Focus for Training-Free Multimodal Representation Learning

The paper introduces Lens, a training‑free framework that aligns multimodal representations with the semantic perspective required by downstream tasks. Lens uses a task‑specific readout phrase to anchor the perspective and then aggregates token states after the full input, ensuring the extracted representation reflects task‑conditioned evidence integration rather than generic salient content. The method achieves a Precision@1 of 63.9 across 36 MMEB datasets, outperforming the nearest training‑free baseline by 10.2 points.

By Xinran Liu, Shouqian Shi, Yixian Chen, Ruizhi Chen, Xin-Wei Yao, Sheng Zhong