REVIEW 11 cited by
Faith and Fate: Limits of Transformers on Compositionality
Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.
SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event
T0 review · schema-true
One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.
pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp
Faith and Fate: Limits of Transformers on Compositionality
read the original abstract
Transformer large language models (LLMs) have sparked admiration for their exceptional performance on tasks that demand intricate multi-step reasoning. Yet, these models simultaneously show failures on surprisingly trivial problems. This begs the question: Are these errors incidental, or do they signal more substantial limitations? In an attempt to demystify transformer LLMs, we investigate the limits of these models across three representative compositional tasks -- multi-digit multiplication, logic grid puzzles, and a classic dynamic programming problem. These tasks require breaking problems down into sub-steps and synthesizing these steps into a precise answer. We formulate compositional tasks as computation graphs to systematically quantify the level of complexity, and break down reasoning steps into intermediate sub-procedures. Our empirical findings suggest that transformer LLMs solve compositional tasks by reducing multi-step compositional reasoning into linearized subgraph matching, without necessarily developing systematic problem-solving skills. To round off our empirical study, we provide theoretical arguments on abstract multi-step reasoning problems that highlight how autoregressive generations' performance can rapidly decay with\,increased\,task\,complexity.
Forward citations
Cited by 11 Pith papers
-
A Verifiable Search Is Not a Learnable Chain-of-Thought
Verifiable search procedures cannot be learned as forward chain-of-thought by language models; they instead learn memorization, verification, or require precomputed catalogs.
-
Proper Scoring Rules for Agentic Uncertainty Quantification
Introduces Trajectory Proper Score (TPS) as a strictly proper family of trajectory-level scoring rules that elicits the complete prefix-conditioned success probability process.
-
Training Transformers as a Universal Computer
A transformer trained on random meaningless MicroPy programs generalizes to execute diverse human-written programs, providing empirical evidence it can act as a universal computer.
-
TSVer: A Benchmark for Fact Verification Against Time-Series Evidence
TSVer is a new benchmark dataset for fact verification against time-series evidence, with 304 annotated real-world claims, 400 time series, verdicts, and justifications, plus baseline results showing current models struggle.
-
Arithmetic Pedagogy for Language Models
A small GPT-2 model trained from scratch on GASING-derived CoT supervision for arithmetic reaches over 80% held-out accuracy, exhibits three learning phases, and develops both procedural and associative reasoning.
-
When Should Users Check? Modeling Confirmation Frequency inMulti-Step Agentic AI Tasks
A decision-theoretic model based on the observed Confirmation-Diagnosis-Correction-Redo user pattern places intermediate confirmations in AI agent tasks, yielding 81% user preference and 13.54% faster completion versu...
-
How Do Language Models Compose Functions?
LLMs solve compositional factual recall either by computing intermediates or directly, with mechanism choice correlated to translation geometry in embedding spaces.
-
LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code
LiveCodeBench collects 400 recent contest problems to create a contamination-free benchmark evaluating LLMs on code generation and related capabilities like self-repair and execution.
-
Game Theory Driven Multi-Agent Framework Mitigates Language Model Hallucination
A game-framed multi-agent system synthesizes large chemistry CoT/QA corpora and trains OmniChem-7B to near GPT-4o-mini performance with a large reported drop in hallucinations.
-
Handling Feature Heterogeneity with Learnable Graph Patches
Learnable graph patches enable domain-agnostic pre-training of graph models by decomposing heterogeneous graphs into transferable semantic units via patch encoders and aggregators.
-
Beyond Exponential Decay: Rethinking Error Accumulation in Large Language Models
LLM errors concentrate in sparse key tokens (5-10% of sequence) at semantic decision junctions, yielding a new reliability model that explains sustained long-context coherence.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.