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Aleksandar Terzic

4 accepted papers

2026

Thompson Sampling via Fine-Tuning of LLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Bayesian optimization in large unstructured discrete spaces is often hindered by the computational cost of maximizing acquisition functions due to the absence of gradients. We propose a scalable alternative based on Thompson sampling that eliminates the need for acquisition function maximization by…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

On the Expressiveness and Length Generalization of Selective State Space Models on Regular Languages

AAAI 2025technical

Selective state-space models (SSMs) are an emerging alternative to the Transformer, offering the unique advantage of parallel training and sequential inference. Although these models have shown promising performance on a variety of tasks, their formal expressiveness and length generalization propert…

2025

Structured Sparse Transition Matrices to Enable State Tracking in State-Space Models

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Modern state-space models (SSMs) often utilize structured transition matrices which enable efficient computation but pose restrictions on the model’s expressivity, as measured in terms of the ability to emulate finite-state automata (FSA). While unstructured transition matrices are optimal in terms…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

Limits of Transformer Language Models on Learning to Compose Algorithms

NeurIPS 2024poster

We analyze the capabilities of Transformer language models in learning compositional discrete tasks. To this end, we evaluate training LLaMA models and prompting GPT-4 and Gemini on four tasks demanding to learn a composition of several discrete sub-tasks. In particular, we measure how well these mo…