Learning Elementary Cellular Automata with Transformers

Large Language Models demonstrate remarkable mathematical capabilities but at the same time struggle with abstract reasoning and planning. In this study, we explore whether Transformers can learn to abstract and generalize the rules governing Elementary Cellular Automata. By training Transformers on state sequences generated with random initial conditions and local rules, we show that they can generalize across different Boolean functions of fixed arity, effectively abstracting the underlying rules. While the models achieve high accuracy in next-state prediction, their performance declines sharply in multi-step planning tasks without intermediate context. Our analysis reveals that including future states or rule prediction in the training loss enhances the models' ability to form internal representations of the rules, leading to improved performance in longer planning horizons and autoregressive generation. Furthermore, we confirm that increasing the model's depth plays a crucial role in extended sequential computations required for complex reasoning tasks. This highlights the potential to improve LLM with inclusion of longer horizons in loss function, as well as incorporating recurrence and adaptive computation time for dynamic control of model depth.

Associative Recurrent Memory Transformer

This paper addresses the challenge of creating a neural architecture for very long sequences that requires constant time for processing new information at each time step. Our approach, Associative Recurrent Memory Transformer (ARMT), is based on transformer self-attention for local context and segment-level recurrence for storage of task specific information distributed over a long context. We demonstrate that ARMT outperfors existing alternatives in associative retrieval tasks and sets a new performance record in the recent BABILong multi-task long-context benchmark by answering single-fact questions over 50 million tokens with an accuracy of 79.9%. The source code for training and evaluation is available on github.

AriGraph: Learning Knowledge Graph World Models with Episodic Memory for LLM Agents

Advancements in generative AI have broadened the potential applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the development of autonomous agents. Achieving true autonomy requires accumulating and updating knowledge gained from interactions with the environment and effectively utilizing it. Current LLM-based approaches leverage past experiences using a full history of observations, summarization or retrieval augmentation. However, these unstructured memory representations do not facilitate the reasoning and planning essential for complex decision-making. In our study, we introduce AriGraph, a novel method wherein the agent constructs a memory graph that integrates semantic and episodic memories while exploring the environment. This graph structure facilitates efficient associative retrieval of interconnected concepts, relevant to the agent's current state and goals, thus serving as an effective environmental model that enhances the agent's exploratory and planning capabilities. We demonstrate that our Ariadne LLM agent, equipped with this proposed memory architecture augmented with planning and decision-making, effectively handles complex tasks on a zero-shot basis in the TextWorld environment. Our approach markedly outperforms established methods such as full-history, summarization, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation in various tasks, including the cooking challenge from the First TextWorld Problems competition and novel tasks like house cleaning and puzzle Treasure Hunting.

Complexity of Symbolic Representation in Working Memory of Transformer Correlates with the Complexity of a Task

Even though Transformers are extensively used for Natural Language Processing tasks, especially for machine translation, they lack an explicit memory to store key concepts of processed texts. This paper explores the properties of the content of symbolic working memory added to the Transformer model decoder. Such working memory enhances the quality of model predictions in machine translation task and works as a neural-symbolic representation of information that is important for the model to make correct translations. The study of memory content revealed that translated text keywords are stored in the working memory, pointing to the relevance of memory content to the processed text. Also, the diversity of tokens and parts of speech stored in memory correlates with the complexity of the corpora for machine translation task.

BABILong: Testing the Limits of LLMs with Long Context Reasoning-in-a-Haystack

In recent years, the input context sizes of large language models (LLMs) have increased dramatically. However, existing evaluation methods have not kept pace, failing to comprehensively assess the efficiency of models in handling long contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce the BABILong benchmark, designed to test language models' ability to reason across facts distributed in extremely long documents. BABILong includes a diverse set of 20 reasoning tasks, including fact chaining, simple induction, deduction, counting, and handling lists/sets. These tasks are challenging on their own, and even more demanding when the required facts are scattered across long natural text. Our evaluations show that popular LLMs effectively utilize only 10-20\% of the context and their performance declines sharply with increased reasoning complexity. Among alternatives to in-context reasoning, Retrieval-Augmented Generation methods achieve a modest 60\% accuracy on single-fact question answering, independent of context length. Among context extension methods, the highest performance is demonstrated by recurrent memory transformers, enabling the processing of lengths up to 11 million tokens. The BABILong benchmark is extendable to any length to support the evaluation of new upcoming models with increased capabilities, and we provide splits up to 1 million token lengths.

In Search of Needles in a 11M Haystack: Recurrent Memory Finds What LLMs Miss

This paper addresses the challenge of processing long documents using generative transformer models. To evaluate different approaches, we introduce BABILong, a new benchmark designed to assess model capabilities in extracting and processing distributed facts within extensive texts. Our evaluation, which includes benchmarks for GPT-4 and RAG, reveals that common methods are effective only for sequences up to $10^4$ elements. In contrast, fine-tuning GPT-2 with recurrent memory augmentations enables it to handle tasks involving up to $11\times 10^6$ elements. This achievement marks a substantial leap, as it is by far the longest input processed by any neural network model to date, demonstrating a significant improvement in the processing capabilities for long sequences.

Uncertainty Guided Global Memory Improves Multi-Hop Question Answering

Transformers have become the gold standard for many natural language processing tasks and, in particular, for multi-hop question answering (MHQA). This task includes processing a long document and reasoning over the multiple parts of it. The landscape of MHQA approaches can be classified into two primary categories. The first group focuses on extracting supporting evidence, thereby constraining the QA model's context to predicted facts. Conversely, the second group relies on the attention mechanism of the long input encoding model to facilitate multi-hop reasoning. However, attention-based token representations lack explicit global contextual information to connect reasoning steps. To address these issues, we propose GEMFormer, a two-stage method that first collects relevant information over the entire document to the memory and then combines it with local context to solve the task. Our experimental results show that fine-tuning a pre-trained model with memory-augmented input, including the most certain global elements, improves the model's performance on three MHQA datasets compared to the baseline. We also found that the global explicit memory contains information from supporting facts required for the correct answer.

Better Together: Enhancing Generative Knowledge Graph Completion with Language Models and Neighborhood Information

Real-world Knowledge Graphs (KGs) often suffer from incompleteness, which limits their potential performance. Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) techniques aim to address this issue. However, traditional KGC methods are computationally intensive and impractical for large-scale KGs, necessitating the learning of dense node embeddings and computing pairwise distances. Generative transformer-based language models (e.g., T5 and recent KGT5) offer a promising solution as they can predict the tail nodes directly. In this study, we propose to include node neighborhoods as additional information to improve KGC methods based on language models. We examine the effects of this imputation and show that, on both inductive and transductive Wikidata subsets, our method outperforms KGT5 and conventional KGC approaches. We also provide an extensive analysis of the impact of neighborhood on model prediction and show its importance. Furthermore, we point the way to significantly improve KGC through more effective neighborhood selection.

Monolingual and Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer for Topic Classification

This article investigates the knowledge transfer from the RuQTopics dataset. This Russian topical dataset combines a large sample number (361,560 single-label, 170,930 multi-label) with extensive class coverage (76 classes). We have prepared this dataset from the "Yandex Que" raw data. By evaluating the RuQTopics - trained models on the six matching classes of the Russian MASSIVE subset, we have proved that the RuQTopics dataset is suitable for real-world conversational tasks, as the Russian-only models trained on this dataset consistently yield an accuracy around 85\% on this subset. We also have figured out that for the multilingual BERT, trained on the RuQTopics and evaluated on the same six classes of MASSIVE (for all MASSIVE languages), the language-wise accuracy closely correlates (Spearman correlation 0.773 with p-value 2.997e-11) with the approximate size of the pretraining BERT's data for the corresponding language. At the same time, the correlation of the language-wise accuracy with the linguistical distance from Russian is not statistically significant.

Active Learning for Abstractive Text Summarization

Construction of human-curated annotated datasets for abstractive text summarization (ATS) is very time-consuming and expensive because creating each instance requires a human annotator to read a long document and compose a shorter summary that would preserve the key information relayed by the original document. Active Learning (AL) is a technique developed to reduce the amount of annotation required to achieve a certain level of machine learning model performance. In information extraction and text classification, AL can reduce the amount of labor up to multiple times. Despite its potential for aiding expensive annotation, as far as we know, there were no effective AL query strategies for ATS. This stems from the fact that many AL strategies rely on uncertainty estimation, while as we show in our work, uncertain instances are usually noisy, and selecting them can degrade the model performance compared to passive annotation. We address this problem by proposing the first effective query strategy for AL in ATS based on diversity principles. We show that given a certain annotation budget, using our strategy in AL annotation helps to improve the model performance in terms of ROUGE and consistency scores. Additionally, we analyze the effect of self-learning and show that it can further increase the performance of the model.