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20212026
most citedWhat Do Language Models Learn in Context? The Structured Task Hypothesis

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cs.CL2026

Characterizing the Expressivity of Local Attention in Transformers

Jiaoda Li, Ryan Cotterell

The transformer is the most popular neural architecture for language modeling. The cornerstone of the transformer is its global attention mechanism, which lets the model aggregate…

cs.CL2025

Probability Distributions Computed by Autoregressive Transformers

Andy Yang, Anej Svete, Jiaoda Li +4

Most expressivity results for transformers treat them as language recognizers -- devices that accept or reject strings -- rather than as they are used in practice: as language mode…

cs.CL2025

Characterizing the Expressivity of Fixed-Precision Transformer Language Models

Jiaoda Li, Ryan Cotterell

Transformer-based language models (LMs) have achieved widespread empirical success, but their theoretical expressive power remains only partially understood. In this work, we analy…

cs.CL2024★ 1 cited

What Do Language Models Learn in Context? The Structured Task Hypothesis

Jiaoda Li, Yifan Hou, Mrinmaya Sachan +1

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit an intriguing ability to learn a novel task from in-context examples presented in a demonstration, termed in-context learning (ICL). Understand…

cs.CL2024

A Transformer with Stack Attention

Jiaoda Li, Jennifer C. White, Mrinmaya Sachan +1

Natural languages are believed to be (mildly) context-sensitive. Despite underpinning remarkably capable large language models, transformers are unable to model many context-free l…

cs.CL2023

Towards a Mechanistic Interpretation of Multi-Step Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models

Yifan Hou, Jiaoda Li, Yu Fei +5

Recent work has shown that language models (LMs) have strong multi-step (i.e., procedural) reasoning capabilities. However, it is unclear whether LMs perform these tasks by cheatin…

cs.CL2022

Probing via Prompting

Jiaoda Li, Ryan Cotterell, Mrinmaya Sachan

Probing is a popular method to discern what linguistic information is contained in the representations of pre-trained language models. However, the mechanism of selecting the probe…

cs.CL2021

Vision Matters When It Should: Sanity Checking Multimodal Machine Translation Models

Jiaoda Li, Duygu Ataman, Rico Sennrich

Multimodal machine translation (MMT) systems have been shown to outperform their text-only neural machine translation (NMT) counterparts when visual context is available. However,…

cs.CL2021

Differentiable Subset Pruning of Transformer Heads

Jiaoda Li, Ryan Cotterell, Mrinmaya Sachan

Multi-head attention, a collection of several attention mechanisms that independently attend to different parts of the input, is the key ingredient in the Transformer. Recent work…