arXiv Machine Learning

A Compositional Theory of Causally Masked Transformers

arXiv:2607. 26988v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: What types of decision problems can a causally masked, finite-precision transformer solve for inputs of arbitrary length?

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
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 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
Jun 17

Dissociating Decodability and Causal Use in Bracket-Sequence Transformers

arXiv:2604. 22128v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When trained on tasks requiring an understanding of hierarchical structure, transformers have been found to represent this hierarchy in distinct ways: in the geometry of the residual stream, and in stack-like attention patterns maintaining a last-in, first-out ordering.

By Aryan Sharma, Cutter Dawes, Shivam Raval