arXiv Machine Learning

Barriers to Universal Reasoning With Transformers (And How to Overcome Them)

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.

arXiv AI
Jun 19

Efficiently Representing Algorithms With Chain-of-Thought Transformers

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 1

Rethinking the Role of Positional Encoding: Sliding-Window Transformers without PE Remain Turing Complete

Positional encoding (PE) is widely viewed as necessary for transformers to process ordered sequences: without them, the next-token map appears permutation-invariant in its context tokens. This intuition underlies all prior universality results, which rely on positional information to prove that transformers with chain-of-thought can perform arbitrary computation, i.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

On the Ability of Transformers to Verify Plans

arXiv:2603. 19954v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers have shown inconsistent success in AI planning tasks, and theoretical understanding of when generalization should be expected has been limited.

By Yash Sarrof, Yupei Du, Katharina Stein, Alexander Koller, Sylvie Thi\'ebaux, Michael Hahn
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 23

Reproducing Recurrent Transformers: The CoTFormer

arXiv:2607. 19405v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The CoTFormer architecture formalizes Chain-of-Thought as a form of recurrent latent computation, preserving intermediate states as attendable representations to mimic explicit reasoning traces.

By Aras Kavuncu, Bryan Vullo, Alberto Berni