Comment by lossolo
3 days ago
Without a provable hold out, claim that "large models do fine on unseen patterns" is unfalsifiable. In controlled from scratch training, CoT performance collapses under modest distribution shift, even with plausible chains. If you have results where the transformation family is provably excluded from training and a large model still shows robust CoT, please share them. Otherwise this paper’s claim stands for the regime it tests.
I don't buy this for the simple fact that benchmarks show much better performance on thinking than on non thinking models. Benchmarks already consider the generalisation and "unseen patterns" aspect.
What would be your argument against
1. COT models performing way better in benchmarks than normal models
2. people choose to use the COT models in day to day life because they actually find that it gives better performance
This paper's claim holds - for 4 layer models. Models improve on out of context examples dramatically at larger scales.
> claim that "large models do fine on unseen patterns" is unfalsifiable
I know what you're saying here, and I know it is primarily a critique of my phrasing, but establishing something like this is the objective of in-context learning theory and mathematical applications of deep learning. It is possible to prove that sufficiently well-trained models will generalize for certain unseen classes of patterns, e.g. transformer acting like gradient descent. There is still a long way to go in the theory---it is difficult research!
> performance collapses under modest distribution shift
The problem is that the notion of "modest" depends on the scale here. With enough varied data and/or enough parameters, what was once out-of-distribution can become in-distribution. The paper is purposely ignorant of this fact. Yes, the claims hold for tiny models, but I don't think anyone ever doubted this.