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://t.co/1WCizIKWlycode: