arXiv Machine Learning By Chenxiao Yang, Zhiyuan Li, David McAllester, Nathan Srebro

Recursive Language Models Generalize Out of Domain

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper investigates how restricting a language model’s view to isolated subtask contexts—via recursive language models—affects learning compared to standard chain‑of‑thought (CoT) approaches. While CoT can simulate recursive reasoning and offers similar in‑distribution performance, it tends to exploit contextual shortcuts that fail out of distribution; recursive models avoid this by isolating context, thereby preventing such shortcuts. The study shows that merely covering the correct rule is insufficient for robust reasoning beyond the training distribution.

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