arXiv:2607. 18759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers with relative positional encodings often extrapolate to sequences longer than those seen during training, whereas transformers with learned absolute encodings typically do not.
By Subham Singh, Ashutosh Mishra, Subha Raut
The paper investigates distance generalization in transformer models, focusing on how well they can handle changes in inter-token distances between training and inference while keeping context length fixed. Using two synthetic delay-copy tasks that require copying tokens after finite delays, the authors evaluate the impact of positional encoding schemes (RoPE, ALiBi, and NoPE), the diversity of distances seen during training, and the conditions under which distance transfer learning is beneficial or detrimental. Their comprehensive study highlights the importance of understanding the underlying mechanisms that govern distance generalization in transformers.
By Daniel Henrik Nevermann, Claudius Gros
arXiv:2606. 24975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: PaTH Attention showed that replacing RoPE's position-indexed rotations with accumulated data-dependent Householder reflections yields strong length extrapolation, though performance degrades at extreme context lengths.
By Mahesh Godavarti
arXiv:2605. 18079v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Existing expressivity results for transformers typically rely on hardmax attention, high precision, and other architectural modifications that disconnect them from the models used in practice.
By Moritz Br\"osamle, Stephan Eckstein
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.
By Oliver Kraus, Yash Sarrof, Yuekun Yao, Alexander Koller, Michael Hahn
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