A Logic for Expressing Log-Precision Transformers
Main Conference Track
Authors: William Merrill, Ashish Sabharwal

One way to interpret the reasoning power of transformer-based language models is to describe the types of logical rules they can resolve over some input text. Recently, Chiang et al. (2023) showed that finite-precision transformer classifiers can be equivalently expressed in a generalization of first-order logic. However, finite-precision transformers are a weak transformer variant because, as we show, a single head can only attend to a constant number of tokens and, in particular, cannot represent uniform attention. Since attending broadly is a core capability for transformers, we ask whether a minimally more expressive model that can attend universally can also be characterized in logic. To this end, we analyze transformers whose forward pass is computed in $\log n$ precision on contexts of length $n$. We prove any log-precision transformer classifier can be equivalently expressed as a first-order logic sentence that, in addition to standard universal and existential quantifiers, may also contain majority-vote quantifiers. This is the tightest known upper bound and first logical characterization of log-precision transformers.