When can transformers reason with abstract symbols?
We investigate the capabilities of transformer models on relational reasoning tasks. In these tasks, models are trained on a set of strings encoding abstract relations, and are then tested out-of-distribution on data that contains symbols that did not appear in the training dataset. We prove that for any relational reasoning task in a large family of tasks, transformers learn the abstract relations and generalize to the test set when trained by gradient descent on sufficiently large quantities of training data. This is in contrast to classical fully-connected networks, which we prove fail to…
Sleep staging is a clinically important task for diagnosing various sleep disorders but remains challenging to deploy at scale because it requires clinical expertise, among other reasons. Deep learning models can perform the task but at the expense of large labeled datasets, which are unfeasible to procure at scale. While…