Recent theoretical results show transformers cannot express sequential reasoning problems over long inputs, intuitively because their computational depth is bounded. However, prior work treats the depth as a constant, leaving it unclear to what degree bounded depth may suffice for solving problems over short inputs, or how increasing the transformer's depth affects its expressive power. We address these questions by analyzing transformers whose depth can grow minimally with context length n. We show even highly uniform transformers with depth Θ(logn) can express two important problems: recognizing regular languages, which captures state tracking abilities and was known to be expressible only by an unconventional, non-uniform model of transformers, and graph connectivity, which underlies multistep reasoning. Notably, both of these problems cannot be expressed by fixed-depth transformers under standard complexity conjectures, demonstrating the expressivity benefit of growing depth. Moreover, our theory quantitatively predicts how depth must grow with input length to express these problems, showing that depth scaling is more efficient than scaling width or chain-of-thought steps. Empirically, our detailed experiments designed to bridge the expressivity vs. learnability gap reveal that our theoretical depth requirements for regular language recognition closely match the practical depth requirements for successfully training transformers. Thus, our results clarify how depth affects a transformer's reasoning capabilities, and provide practical guidance for effective depth selection for sequential reasoning.

We present a formal and constructive simulation framework for nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs) using time-shared, depth-unrolled feedforward networks (TS-FFNs), i.e., acyclic unrolled computations with shared parameters that are functionally equivalent to unrolled recurrent or state-space models. Unlike prior approaches that rely on explicit recurrent architectures or post hoc extraction methods, our formulation symbolically encodes automaton states as binary vectors, transitions as sparse matrix transformations, and nondeterministic branching-including $\varepsilon$-closures-as compositions of shared thresholded updates. We prove that every regular language can be recognized exactly by such a shared-parameter unrolled feedforward network, with parameter count independent of input length. Our construction yields a constructive equivalence between NFAs and neural networks and demonstrates \emph{empirical learnability}: these networks can be trained via gradient descent on supervised acceptance data to recover the target automaton behavior. This learnability, formalized in Proposition 5.1, is the crux of this work. Extensive experiments validate the theoretical results, achieving perfect or near-perfect agreement on acceptance, state propagation, and closure dynamics. This work clarifies the correspondence between automata theory and modern neural architectures, showing that unrolled feedforward networks can perform precise, interpretable, and trainable symbolic computation.

Recently, recurrent models based on linear state space models (SSMs) have shown promising performance in language modeling (LM), competititve with transformers. However, there is little understanding of the in-principle abilities of such models, which could provide useful guidance to the search for better LM architectures. We present a comprehensive theoretical study of the capacity of such SSMs as it compares to that of transformers and traditional RNNs. We find that SSMs and transformers have overlapping but distinct strengths. In star-free state tracking, SSMs implement length-generalizing solutions to problems that transformers struggle to represent exactly. They can also model bounded hierarchical structure with optimal memory even without simulating a stack. On the other hand, we identify a design choice in current SSMs that limits their expressive power.

Despite the theoretical significance and wide practical use of regular expressions, the computational complexity of learning them has been largely unexplored. We study the computational hardness of improperly learning regular expressions in the PAC model and with membership queries. We show that PAC learning is hard even under the uniform distribution on the hypercube, and also prove hardness of distribution-free learning with membership queries. Furthermore, if regular expressions are extended with complement or intersection, we establish hardness of learning with membership queries even under the uniform distribution. We emphasize that these results do not follow from existing hardness results for learning DFAs or NFAs, since the descriptive complexity of regular languages can differ exponentially between DFAs, NFAs, and regular expressions.

Other comments will be taken into account in the revision. Reviewer_45: Thank you for the positive feedback and constructive comments.

We prove that all standard subregular language classes are linearly separable when represented by their deciding predicates. This establishes finite observability and guarantees learnability with simple linear models. Synthetic experiments confirm perfect separability under noise-free conditions, while real-data experiments on English morphology show that learned features align with well-known linguistic constraints. These results demonstrate that the subregular hierarchy provides a rigorous and interpretable foundation for modeling natural language structure. Our code used in real-data experiments is available at https://github.com/UTokyo-HayashiLab/subregular.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising performance across diverse domains. Many practical applications of LLMs, such as code completion and structured data extraction, require adherence to syntactic constraints specified by a formal language. Yet, due to their probabilistic nature, LLM output is not guaranteed to adhere to such formal languages. Prior work has proposed constrained decoding as a means to restrict LLM generation to particular formal languages. However, existing works are not applicable to the emerging paradigm of diffusion LLMs, when used in practical scenarios such as the generation of formally correct C++ or JSON output. In this paper we address this challenge and present the first constrained decoding method for diffusion models, one that can handle formal languages captured by context-free grammars. We begin by reducing constrained decoding to the more general additive infilling problem, which asks whether a partial output can be completed to a valid word in the target language. This problem also naturally subsumes the previously unaddressed multi-region infilling constrained decoding. We then reduce this problem to the task of deciding whether the intersection of the target language and a regular language is empty and present an efficient algorithm to solve it for context-free languages. Empirical results on various applications, such as C++ code infilling and structured data extraction in JSON, demonstrate that our method achieves near-perfect syntactic correctness while consistently preserving or improving functional correctness. Importantly, our efficiency optimizations ensure that the computational overhead remains practical.

This fixed function is modeled by a neural networks with one hidden-layer.