2021

Linear algebra with transformers

Charton, François

Understand

Transformers can learn to perform numerical computations from examples only.

  • I study nine problems of linear algebra, from basic matrix operations to eigenvalue decomposition and inversion, and introduce and discuss four encoding schemes to represent real numbers.
  • On all problems, transformers trained on sets of random matrices achieve high accuracies (over 90%).
  • The models are robust to noise, and can generalize out of their training distribution.

Reading the bibliography…