{"paper":{"title":"Spectral Journey: How Transformers Predict the Shortest Path","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Andrew Cohen, Andrey Gromov, Kaiyu Yang, Yuandong Tian","submitted_at":"2025-02-12T21:17:30Z","abstract_excerpt":"Decoder-only transformers lead to a step-change in capability of large language models. However, opinions are mixed as to whether they are really planning or reasoning. A path to making progress in this direction is to study the model's behavior in a setting with carefully controlled data. Then interpret the learned representations and reverse-engineer the computation performed internally. We study decoder-only transformer language models trained from scratch to predict shortest paths on simple, connected and undirected graphs. In this setting, the representations and the dynamics learned by t"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2502.08794","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2502.08794/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}