ICML 2026 Spotlight Paper Shows Transformers Acquire Analogical Reasoning

Our paper was accepted as a #ICML2026 Spotlight! Reasoning in LLMs has improved largely by chaining local steps. But is that the whole story? Humans occasionally make inferential "leaps" across domains, a faculty known as analogy. We design a synthetic task to show how small Transformers acquire analogical reasoning, and find that the same signatures appear in pretrained LLMs. arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01992 code: https://github.com/gouki510/Analogy_in_Transformer