Roots of Understanding: When Transformers Try to Learn the Language of Numbers
Numbers look simple until you ask a model to continue them. That is the quiet trap in Testing Transformer Learnability on the Arithmetic Sequence of Rooted Trees.1 The paper does not ask whether a transformer can chat about prime numbers, recite factorization facts, or hallucinate Euclid with confidence. It asks a cleaner question: if we translate the natural numbers into a symbolic language whose grammar is generated by prime factorization, can a GPT-2-style transformer learn that grammar from sequence data alone? ...