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What Formal Languages Can Transformers Express? A Survey

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arxiv 2311.00208 v3 pith:KBDGQHZV submitted 2023-11-01 cs.LG cs.CLcs.FLcs.LO

classification cs.LGcs.CLcs.FLcs.LO
keywords transformersformallanguagesproblemssurveywhatworkarchitectural
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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As transformers have gained prominence in natural language processing, some researchers have investigated theoretically what problems they can and cannot solve, by treating problems as formal languages. Exploring such questions can help clarify the power of transformers relative to other models of computation, their fundamental capabilities and limits, and the impact of architectural choices. Work in this subarea has made considerable progress in recent years. Here, we undertake a comprehensive survey of this work, documenting the diverse assumptions that underlie different results and providing a unified framework for harmonizing seemingly contradictory findings.

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Cited by 2 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. When Does Reward Teach State? A Hidden-Automaton Instrument and the Group-Language Boundary

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    High reward in sparse RL does not imply latent-state recovery; a hidden-DFA instrument separates perception from planning gaps and flags group-language structure as a pre-training warning.

  2. Rethinking Memorization Measures and their Implications in Large Language Models

    cs.LG 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Contextual memorization, defined by comparing a string's training loss against the best loss without training on that string, is stricter than counterfactual memorization and suggests that zero-memorization optimal le...

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