Paper ID: 2406.00075

Arbitrary-Length Generalization for Addition in a Tiny Transformer

Alexandre Galvao Patriota

This paper introduces a novel training methodology that enables a Transformer model to generalize the addition of two-digit numbers to numbers with unseen lengths of digits. The proposed approach employs an autoregressive generation technique, processing from right to left, which mimics a common manual method for adding large numbers. To the best of my knowledge, this methodology has not been previously explored in the literature. All results are reproducible, and the corresponding R code is available at github.com/AGPatriota/ALGA-R/.

Submitted: May 31, 2024