Length generalization, defined as the ability to extrapolate from shorter training sequences to longer test ones, is a significant challenge for language models. This issue persists even with large-scale Transformers handling relatively straightforward tasks. In this paper, we test the Transformer's ability of length generalization using the task of addition of two integers. We show that the success of length generalization is intricately linked to the data format and the type of position encoding. Using the right combination of data format and position encodings, we show for the first time that standard Transformers can extrapolate to a sequence length that is 2.5x the input length. Nevertheless, unlike in-distribution generalization, length generalization remains fragile, significantly influenced by factors like random weight initialization and training data order, leading to large variances across different random seeds.

使用适当的数据格式和位置编码的组合，本研究首次展示了标准Transformers在能够外推到输入长度2.5倍的序列长度方面的成功，然而与内分布泛化不同，长度泛化仍然是脆弱的，受到随机权重初始化和训练数据顺序等因素的显著影响，导致不同随机种子之间存在较大差异。

Transformer 模型可以实现长度概括，但不具备鲁棒性