88.8LOMay 8
Cross-Attention and Encoder-Decoder Transformers: A Logical CharacterizationVeeti Ahvonen, Damian Heiman, Antti Kuusisto et al.
We give a novel logical characterization of encoder-decoder transformers, the foundational architecture for LLMs that also sees use in various settings that benefit from cross-attention. We study such transformers over text in the practical setting of floating-point numbers and soft-attention, characterizing them with a new temporal logic. This logic extends propositional logic with a counting global modality over the encoder input and a past modality over the decoder input. We also give an additional characterization of such transformers via a type of distributed automata, and show that our results are not limited to the specific choices in the architecture and can account for changes in, e.g., masking. Finally, we discuss encoder-decoder transformers in the autoregressive setting.
LGAug 14, 2025
Graph Learning via Logic-Based Weisfeiler-Leman Variants and TabularizationReijo Jaakkola, Tomi Janhunen, Antti Kuusisto et al.
We present a novel approach for graph classification based on tabularizing graph data via variants of the Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm and then applying methods for tabular data. We investigate a comprehensive class of Weisfeiler-Leman variants obtained by modifying the underlying logical framework and establish a precise theoretical characterization of their expressive power. We then test two selected variants on twelve benchmark datasets that span a range of different domains. The experiments demonstrate that our approach matches the accuracy of state-of-the-art graph neural networks and graph kernels while being more time or memory efficient, depending on the dataset. We also briefly discuss directly extracting interpretable modal logic formulas from graph datasets.