The Scaling Properties of Implicit Deductive Reasoning in Transformers

Enrico Vompa; Tanel Tammet

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arXiv · 2605.04330

The Scaling Properties of Implicit Deductive Reasoning in Transformers

Enrico Vompa·Tanel Tammet

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Abstract

We investigate the scaling properties of implicit deductive reasoning over Horn clauses in depth-bounded Transformers. By systematically decorrelating provability from spurious features and enforcing algorithmic alignment, we find that in sufficiently deep models with a bidirectional prefix mask, implicit reasoning approaches explicit CoT performance across graph topologies and problem widths, though CoT remains necessary for depth extrapolation.

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BibTeX RIS

Enrico Vompa, Tanel Tammet. 2026-05-05. The Scaling Properties of Implicit Deductive Reasoning in Transformers. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04330

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