Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722

Can multi-step reasoning be learned from data? We investigate this question in the context of a simple function composition task. We prove that this task is hard to learn in the Statistical Query model, but is easy to learn with transformers under various forms of curriculum learning. This is joint work with Zixuan Wang, Eshaan Nichani, Alberto Bietti, Alex Damian, Jason Lee, and Denny Wu.