5 papers · 1 filter
Disentangling the Expressivity of RoPE
Selim Jerad, Anej Svete, Jiaoda Li +1
Two accounts recur in explanations of the success of rotary position embeddings (RoPE). Expressivity studies associate periodic position information with modular predicates, wherea…
Understanding the Parameter Space Geometry of Transformers Encoding Boolean Functions
Blanka Köver, Alexandra Butoi, Anej Svete +2
Transformers consistently fail to learn certain simple functions that are provably expressible with specific parameter settings. This gap between learnability and expressivity is p…
Context-Free Recognition with Transformers
Selim Jerad, Anej Svete, Sophie Hao +2
Transformers excel empirically on tasks that process well-formed inputs according to some grammar, such as natural language and code. However, it remains unclear how they can proce…
Revisiting Padded Transformer Expressivity: Which Architectural Choices Matter and Which Don't
Anej Svete, William Merrill, Ryan Cotterell +1
Recent work describes what transformers can and cannot compute through connections to boolean circuits, but existing results lack exact characterizations and are sensitive to model…
Unique Hard Attention: A Tale of Two Sides
Selim Jerad, Anej Svete, Jiaoda Li +1
Understanding the expressive power of transformers has recently attracted attention, as it offers insights into their abilities and limitations. Many studies analyze unique hard at…