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Moving Beyond Next-Token Prediction: Transformers are Context-Sensitive Language Generators

2025-04-15 · Phill Kyu Rhee

Large Language Models (LLMs), powered by Transformers, have demonstrated human-like intelligence capabilities, yet their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper presents a novel framework for interpreting LLMs as probabilistic left context-sensitive languages (CSLs) generators. We hypothesize that Transformers can be effectively decomposed into three fundamental components: context windows, attention mechanisms, and autoregressive generation frameworks. This decomposition allows for the development of more flexible and interpretable computational models, moving beyond the traditional view of attention and autoregression as inseparable processes. We argue that next-token predictions can be understood as probabilistic, dynamic approximations of left CSL production rules, providing an intuitive explanation for how simple token predictions can yield human-like intelligence outputs. Given that all CSLs are left context-sensitive (Penttonen, 1974), we conclude that Transformers stochastically approximate CSLs, which are widely recognized as models of human-like intelligence. This interpretation bridges the gap between Formal Language Theory and the observed generative power of Transformers, laying a foundation for future advancements in generative AI theory and applications. Our novel perspective on Transformer architectures will foster a deeper understanding of LLMs and their future potentials.

📄 PDF Abstract BibTeX arXiv:2504.10845

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Attention 설명 없음
Linear Layer A Linear Layer is a projection $\mathbf{XW + b}$.
Softmax The Softmax output function transforms a previous layer's output into a vector of probabilities. It is commonly used for multiclass classification. Given an input vector $x$…
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BPE Byte Pair Encoding, or BPE, is a subword segmentation algorithm that encodes rare and unknown words as sequences of subword units. The intuition is that various word…
Absolute Position Encodings Absolute Position Encodings are a type of position embeddings for [Transformer-based models] where positional encodings are…
Residual Connection 설명 없음
Label Smoothing Label Smoothing is a regularization technique that introduces noise for the labels. This accounts for the fact that datasets may have mistakes in them, so maximizing the…

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