The Communication Bottleneck: A Round-Trip Study of Tree-Structured Expression Serialization in Language Models
When language models reason in chain-of-thought or exchange free-text intermediates, they serialize structured information into natural language. How much tree-structured compositional content survives this bottleneck? We propose a round-trip protocol that answers this question empirically for tree-structured expressions. A generator converts a procedurally generated arithmetic expression into a word problem, a separate extractor recovers the expression from the word problem alone, and symbolic equivalence provides an exact oracle. Evaluating all pairwise combinations of sixteen models yields…
Long-horizon execution in Large Language Models (LLMs) remains unstable even when high-level strategies are provided. Evaluating on controlled algorithmic puzzles, we demonstrate that while decomposition is essential for stability, extreme decomposition creates a “no-recovery bottleneck”. We show that this bottleneck becomes critical due to highly non-uniform error distribution, where consistent…
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) laid the foundation for sequence modeling, but their intrinsic sequential nature restricts parallel computation, creating a fundamental barrier to scaling. This has led to the dominance of parallelizable architectures like Transformers and, more recently, State Space Models (SSMs). While SSMs achieve efficient parallelization through structured linear…
Large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved their capability in performing NLP tasks. However, deeper semantic understanding, contextual coherence, and more subtle reasoning are still difficult to obtain. The paper discusses state-of-the-art methodologies that advance LLMs with more advanced NLU techniques, such as semantic parsing, knowledge integration, and contextual reinforcement…