Chain of Thought (CoT) lifts the expressive ceiling of bounded-depth Transformers, with characterizations tying the number of CoT steps to circuit complexity classes. What remains largely missing are concrete instantiations with explicit, depth-bounded constructions, and the traversal procedures such characterizations presuppose.
arXiv:2608. 30273v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The exact Shannon capacity is unknown for every odd cycle beyond the five-cycle $C_5$, making odd cycles a central open problem in zero-error information theory.
By Ravi Tandon
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
arXiv:2609. 04046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: What can a single layer of self-attention compute?
By Rajmohan Rajaraman, Ravi Sundaram, Amanuel Tesfaye
arXiv:2603.21676v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Standard Transformers have a fixed computational depth, limiting their ability to generalize to tasks that require variable-depth reasoning....
By Hung-Hsuan Chen
arXiv:2608.31067v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Learning generalizable algorithmic computations remains a challenge for neural networks, as reflected in persistent failures on compositional and lengt...
By Takuya Ito, Ruchir Puri, Murray Campbell, Parikshit Ram
arXiv:2606. 18520v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computing geometric representations of data is a cornerstone of modern machine learning, typically achieved by training dual encoders which map queries and documents into a shared embedding space.
By Prashant Gokhale, Piotr Indyk, Yuhao Liu, Sandeep Silwal, Tony Chang Wang, Haike Xu
arXiv:2608. 03962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern large language models - transformers and diffusion language models - are built around two canonical algorithmic tasks: prediction and generation.
By Srinivasan Arunachalam, Arkopal Dutt, Hari Krovi, Rik Sengupta
arXiv:2607. 10194v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present IsalHG, a method for representing the structure of any finite, connected hypergraph of bounded hyperedge arity as a string over a compact instruction alphabet $\Sigma_{\mathrm{HG}}$.
By Mario Pascual-Gonzalez, Ezequiel Lopez-Rubio
Modern large language models - transformers and diffusion language models - are built around two canonical algorithmic tasks: prediction and generation. We prove unconditional separations between low-depth quantum computation and the corresponding bounded-resource classical language-model architectures in both regimes.
arXiv:2603. 03612v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The community is increasingly exploring linear RNNs (LRNNs) as language models, motivated by their expressive power and parallelizability.
By William Merrill, Hongjian Jiang, Yanhong Li, Anthony Lin, Ashish Sabharwal
arXiv:2609.01441v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNN) based on message passing are provably no more powerful than the one-dimensional Weisfeiler--Leman colour-refinement test (1...
By Lilian Marey, Charlotte Laclau