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Tracr-Injection: Distilling Algorithms into Pre-Trained Language Models (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule on Jun 11, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They bake algorithms written in a coding language into a trained language model's weights, so it runs the algorithm instead of learning it from text. Injecting three algorithms left a readable channel for the code's variables and handled new cases better than the baseline.

Abstract · Tracr-Injection: Distilling Algorithms into Pre-trained Language Models

Motivated by the surge of large language models, there has been a push to formally characterize the symbolic abilities intrinsic to the transformer architecture. A programming language, called RASP, has been proposed, which can be directly compiled into transformer weights to implement these algorithms. However, the tasks that can be implemented in RASP are often uncommon to learn from natural unsupervised data, showing a mismatch between theoretical capabilities of the transformer architecture, and the practical learnability of these capabilities from unsupervised data. We propose tracr-injection, a method that allows us to distill algorithms written in RASP directly into a pre-trained language model. We showcase our method by injecting 3 different algorithms into a language model. We show how our method creates an interpretable subspace within the model's residual stream, which can be decoded into the variables present in the code of the RASP algorithm. Additionally, we found that the proposed method can improve out-of-distribution performance compared to our baseline, indicating that indeed a more symbolic mechanism is taking place in the inner workings of the model. We release the code used to run our experiments.

Tomás Vergara-Browne, Álvaro Soto
arXiv:2505.10719 · cs.CL · submitted May 15, 2025 · updated Jun 2, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · ACL Findings 2025

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