Related papers: In-context Learning and Induction Heads
In-context learning (ICL) is one of the surprising and useful features of large language models and subject of intense research. Recently, stylized meta-learning-like ICL setups have been devised that train transformers on sequences of…
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate an impressive ability to utilise information within the context of their input sequences to appropriately respond to data unseen by the LLM during its training procedure. This ability is known as…
In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to acquire new behaviors from the input sequence alone without any parameter updates. Recent studies have shown that ICL can surpass the original meaning learned in pretraining…
The transformer architecture has become the foundation of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its theoretical properties are still not well understood. As with classic neural networks, a common approach to improve these models is to…
We observe a novel phenomenon, contextual entrainment, across a wide range of language models (LMs) and prompt settings, providing a new mechanistic perspective on how LMs become distracted by ``irrelevant'' contextual information in the…
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…
Neural processes (NPs) are a powerful family of meta-learning models that seek to approximate the posterior predictive map of the ground-truth stochastic process from which each dataset in a meta-dataset is sampled. There are many cases in…
People use rich prior knowledge about the world in order to efficiently learn new concepts. These priors - also known as "inductive biases" - pertain to the space of internal models considered by a learner, and they help the learner make…
Transformers have transformed modern machine learning, driving breakthroughs in computer vision, natural language processing, and robotics. At the core of their success lies the attention mechanism, which enables the modeling of global…
The intriguing in-context learning (ICL) abilities of deep Transformer models have lately garnered significant attention. By studying in-context linear regression on unimodal Gaussian data, recent empirical and theoretical works have argued…
Attention mechanisms that confer selective focus on a strict subset of input elements are nearly ubiquitous in language models today. We posit there to be downside to the use of attention: most input information is lost. In support of this…
Large language models have demonstrated strong capabilities to learn in-context, where exemplar input-output pairings are appended to the prompt for demonstration. However, existing work has demonstrated the ability of models to learn…
In-context learning (ICL) emerges as a promising capability of large language models (LLMs) by providing them with demonstration examples to perform diverse tasks. However, the underlying mechanism of how LLMs learn from the provided…
Attention-based mechanisms are widely used in machine learning, most prominently in transformers. However, hyperparameters such as the rank of the attention matrices and the number of heads are scaled nearly the same way in all realizations…
The unusual properties of in-context learning (ICL) have prompted investigations into the internal mechanisms of large language models. Prior work typically focuses on either special attention heads or task vectors at specific layers, but…
This paper investigates context stickiness in in-context learning (ICL), a phenomenon where earlier examples in a prompt interfere with a transformer's ability to adapt to later tasks. Using synthetic regression tasks over linear and…
In-context learning (ICL) is a key building block of modern large language models, yet its theoretical mechanisms remain poorly understood. It is particularly mysterious how ICL operates in real-world applications where tasks have a common…
Pre-training Transformer from large-scale raw texts and fine-tuning on the desired task have achieved state-of-the-art results on diverse NLP tasks. However, it is unclear what the learned attention captures. The attention computed by…
Inductive reasoning is a core problem-solving capacity: humans can identify underlying principles from a few examples, which robustly generalize to novel scenarios. Recent work evaluates large language models (LLMs) on inductive reasoning…
Recently, it has been shown that transformers pre-trained on diverse datasets with multi-episode contexts can generalize to new reinforcement learning tasks in-context. A key limitation of previously proposed models is their reliance on a…