Larry Caused the Car to Stop, But the Model Didn't Notice: Transformer Blindness to the M-Heuristic

arXiv:2609.37497 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-09-27 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-09-27

Updated: 2026-09-27

Code: https://github.com/ClaudiuCreanga/m-heuristic

Terminology

• Accuracy — 21× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Transformer — 14× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Pragmatics — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Semantic Similarity — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Trace — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer Models — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Alternation — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Scaffolding — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Attention Mechanism — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Embeddings — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generative AI — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adaptation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Aperture — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Instruction Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Linear probe — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Semantic Understanding — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Structured Reasoning — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Transformer Architecture — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Pragmatics in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey on Datasets, Evaluation, Opportunities and Challenges
• Do Large Language Models Understand Conversational Implicature -- A case study with a chinese sitcom
• ANLIzing the Adversarial Natural Language Inference Dataset
• RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach

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