Why Can't Transformers Learn Multiplication? Reverse-Engineering Reveals
  Long-Range Dependency Pitfalls
Authors: name: Xiaoyan Bai; name: Itamar Pres; name: Yuntian Deng; name: Chenhao Tan; name: Stuart Shieber; name: Fernanda Viégas; name: Martin Wattenberg; name: Andrew Lee
Published: 2025-09-30 19:03:26

Abstract: Language models are increasingly capable, yet still fail at a seemingly
simple task of multi-digit multiplication. In this work, we study why, by
reverse-engineering a model that successfully learns multiplication via
implicit chain-of-thought, and report three findings: (1) Evidence of
long-range structure: Logit attributions and linear probes indicate that the
model encodes the necessary long-range dependencies for multi-digit
multiplication. (2) Mechanism: the model encodes long-range dependencies using
attention to construct a directed acyclic graph to ``cache'' and ``retrieve''
pairwise partial products. (3) Geometry: the model implements partial products
in attention heads by forming Minkowski sums between pairs of digits, and
digits are represented using a Fourier basis, both of which are intuitive and
efficient representations that the standard fine-tuning model lacks. With these
insights, we revisit the learning dynamics of standard fine-tuning and find
that the model converges to a local optimum that lacks the required long-range
dependencies. We further validate this understanding by introducing an
auxiliary loss that predicts the ``running sum'' via a linear regression probe,
which provides an inductive bias that enables the model to successfully learn
multi-digit multiplication. In summary, by reverse-engineering the mechanisms
of an implicit chain-of-thought model we uncover a pitfall for learning
long-range dependencies in Transformers and provide an example of how the
correct inductive bias can address this issue.