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The Role of Logic and Automata in Understanding Transformers

Published: September 28, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2509.24024v1

By: Anthony W. Lin, Pablo Barcelo

Potential Business Impact:

Makes computers understand language and solve problems.

Business Areas:
Natural Language Processing Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

The advent of transformers has in recent years led to powerful and revolutionary Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite this, our understanding on the capability of transformers is still meager. In this invited contribution, we recount the rapid progress in the last few years to the question of what transformers can do. In particular, we will see the integral role of logic and automata (also with some help from circuit complexity) in answering this question. We also mention several open problems at the intersection of logic, automata, verification and transformers.

Page Count
15 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Formal Languages and Automata Theory