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Looped Transformers for Length Generalization

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arxiv 2409.15647 v5 pith:3KQZCGFO submitted 2024-09-24 cs.LG

Looped Transformers for Length Generalization

classification cs.LG
keywords transformerslengthgeneralizationloopedtasksinputslength-generalizableoperation
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Recent work has shown that Transformers trained from scratch can successfully solve various arithmetic and algorithmic tasks, such as adding numbers and computing parity. While these Transformers generalize well on unseen inputs of the same length, they struggle with length generalization, i.e., handling inputs of unseen lengths. In this work, we demonstrate that looped Transformers with an adaptive number of steps significantly improve length generalization. We focus on tasks with a known iterative solution, involving multiple iterations of a RASP-L operation - a length-generalizable operation that can be expressed by a finite-sized Transformer. We train looped Transformers using our proposed learning algorithm and observe that they learn highly length-generalizable solutions for various tasks.

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Cited by 22 Pith papers

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

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  5. Simply Stabilizing the Loop via Fully Looped Transformer

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  20. Simply Stabilizing the Loop via Fully Looped Transformer

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  21. Neural Scaling Universality: If Exponents Are Fixed, Time to Understand Coefficients

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  22. Exploration of Fast-Slow Latent Recurrence for Train-Short, Test-Long Generalization

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