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We study how multi-head softmax attention models are trained to perform in-context learning on linear data. Through extensive empirical experiments and rigorous theoretical analysis, we demystify the emergence of elegant attention patterns:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Jianliang He , Xintian Pan , Siyu Chen , Zhuoran Yang

Recently, the mysterious In-Context Learning (ICL) ability exhibited by Transformer architectures, especially in large language models (LLMs), has sparked significant research interest. However, the resilience of Transformers' in-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Chen Cheng , Xinzhi Yu , Haodong Wen , Jingsong Sun , Guanzhang Yue , Yihao Zhang , Zeming Wei

We propose Context Diffusion, a diffusion-based framework that enables image generation models to learn from visual examples presented in context. Recent work tackles such in-context learning for image generation, where a query image is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Ivona Najdenkoska , Animesh Sinha , Abhimanyu Dubey , Dhruv Mahajan , Vignesh Ramanathan , Filip Radenovic

The predominant success of diffusion models in generative modeling has spurred significant interest in understanding their theoretical foundations. In this work, we propose a feature learning framework aimed at analyzing and comparing the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-04 Andi Han , Wei Huang , Yuan Cao , Difan Zou

We show that a neural network originally designed for language processing can learn the dynamical rules of a stochastic system by observation of a single dynamical trajectory of the system, and can accurately predict its emergent behavior…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-02-18 Corneel Casert , Isaac Tamblyn , Stephen Whitelam

Language models have the ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), allowing them to flexibly adapt their behavior based on context. This contrasts with in-weights learning (IWL), where memorized information is encoded in model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Suraj Anand , Michael A. Lepori , Jack Merullo , Ellie Pavlick

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks without weight updates by learning from demonstration sequences. While ICL shows strong empirical performance, its internal representational mechanisms are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jiachen Jiang , Yuxin Dong , Jinxin Zhou , Zhihui Zhu

Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Yuxuan Li , James L. McClelland

Many of language models' impressive capabilities originate from their in-context learning: based on instructions or examples, they can infer and perform new tasks without weight updates. In this work, we investigate when representations for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Yuxuan Li , Declan Campbell , Stephanie C. Y. Chan , Andrew Kyle Lampinen

Statistical learning relies upon data sampled from a distribution, and we usually do not care what actually generated it in the first place. From the point of view of causal modeling, the structure of each distribution is induced by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-11 Giambattista Parascandolo , Niki Kilbertus , Mateo Rojas-Carulla , Bernhard Schölkopf

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit unexpected errors or unintended behavior, even at scale. While recent work reveals the discrepancy between LLMs and humans in skill compositions, the learning dynamics of skill compositions and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Xingyu Zhao , Darsh Sharma , Rheeya Uppaal , Yiqiao Zhong

Large language models based on transformers have achieved great empirical successes. However, as they are deployed more widely, there is a growing need to better understand their internal mechanisms in order to make them more reliable.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-08 Alberto Bietti , Vivien Cabannes , Diane Bouchacourt , Herve Jegou , Leon Bottou

The remarkable capability of Transformers to do reasoning and few-shot learning, without any fine-tuning, is widely conjectured to stem from their ability to implicitly simulate a multi-step algorithms -- such as gradient descent -- with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Khashayar Gatmiry , Nikunj Saunshi , Sashank J. Reddi , Stefanie Jegelka , Sanjiv Kumar

Large language models (LLM) have emerged as a powerful tool for AI, with the key ability of in-context learning (ICL), where they can perform well on unseen tasks based on a brief series of task examples without necessitating any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Zhenmei Shi , Junyi Wei , Zhuoyan Xu , Yingyu Liang

The most basic assumption used in statistical learning theory is that training data and test data are drawn from the same underlying distribution. Unfortunately, in many applications, the "in-domain" test data is drawn from a distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-09-30 H. Daume , D. Marcu

Attention-based architectures trained on internet-scale language data have demonstrated state of the art reasoning ability for various language-based tasks, such as logic problems and textual reasoning. Additionally, these Large Language…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Mark Van der Merwe , Devesh Jha

Large autoregressive models like Transformers can solve tasks through in-context learning (ICL) without learning new weights, suggesting avenues for efficiently solving new tasks. For many tasks, e.g., linear regression, the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Sarthak Mittal , Eric Elmoznino , Leo Gagnon , Sangnie Bhardwaj , Tom Marty , Dhanya Sridhar , Guillaume Lajoie

We investigate the in-context learning capabilities of transformers for the $d$-dimensional mixture of linear regression model, providing theoretical insights into their existence, generalization bounds, and training dynamics. Specifically,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-11 Yanhao Jin , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Lifeng Lai

Deep learning systems achieve remarkable empirical performance, yet the stability of the training process itself remains poorly understood. Training unfolds as a high-dimensional dynamical system in which small perturbations to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Zhipeng Zhang , Zhenjie Yao , Kai Li , Lei Yang

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of being in-context learners. However, the underlying mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) is still a major research question, and experimental research results about how models exploit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Aliakbar Nafar , Kristen Brent Venable , Parisa Kordjamshidi