We present a theoretical framework to explain the emergence of inductive reasoning abilities in Transformer language models. While previous works on Transformer learning dynamics have so far been mostly tied to specific tasks, we study a generalized class of inductive tasks that unifies several synthetic tasks known in the literature, including in-context n-grams and multi-hop reasoning.
arXiv:2510. 25013v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability aims to reverse-engineer large language models (LLMs) into human-understandable computational circuits.
By Rabin Adhikari
arXiv:2601. 15158v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformers trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) with outcome-based supervision can spontaneously develop the ability to generate intermediate reasoning steps (Chain-of-Thought).
By Yuval Ran-Milo, Yotam Alexander, Shahar Mendel, Nadav Cohen
arXiv:2604. 07822v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study implicit reasoning, i.
By Harsh Kohli, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Huan Sun, Yuekun Yao
arXiv:2607. 15178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer reasoning is limited by autoregressive decoding, which repeat edly compresses rich hidden computation through token space and makes it difficult for intermediate reasoning states to persist across time.
By Ziyang Cai, Xingyu Zhu, Yihe Dong, Yinghui He, Sanjeev Arora
arXiv:2602. 22600v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Training selects for behavior, not circuitry: many weight configurations can implement the same function.
By Joshua S. Schiffman