Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to announce our February webinar on Feb 26, 1 pm Eastern Time, featured by Dr. Zhuoran Yang at Yale University. Hope to see you there!
Title: Unlocking Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Transformers via Recursive Latent Space Reasoning
Speakers: Dr. Zhuoran Yang, Yale University
Date and Time: Feb 26, 2026, 1:00 to 2:30 pm Eastern Time
Registration Link: ASA SLDS Webinar Registration Link [eventbrite.com]
Abstract: Systematic, compositional generalization beyond the training distribution remains a core challenge in machine learning -- and a critical bottleneck for the emergent reasoning abilities of modern language models. This work investigates out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization in Transformer networks using a GSM8K-style modular arithmetic on computational graphs task as a testbed. We introduce and explore a set of four architectural mechanisms aimed at enhancing OOD generalization: (i) input-adaptive recurrence; (ii) algorithmic supervision; (iii) anchored latent representations via a discrete bottleneck; and (iv) an explicit error-correction mechanism. Collectively, these mechanisms yield an architectural approach for native and scalable latent space reasoning in Transformer networks with robust algorithmic generalization capabilities. We complement these empirical results with a detailed mechanistic interpretability analysis that reveals how these mechanisms give rise to robust OOD generalization abilities. This is joint work with Awni Altabaa, Siyu Chen, and John Lafferty.
Presenter: Zhuoran Yang is an Assistant Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Yale University, starting in July 2022. His research interests lie in the interface between machine learning, statistics, and optimization. He is particularly interested in the foundations of reinforcement learning, representation learning, and deep learning. Before joining Yale, Zhuoran worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, advised by Michael. I. Jordan. Prior to that, he obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University, co-advised by Jianqing Fan and Han Liu. He received his bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Tsinghua University in 2015.
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Boxiang Wang
Associate Professor
Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA, United States
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