Related papers: In-context Learning and Induction Heads
In-context learning (ICL) derives its power from enabling Large Language Models to adapt to new tasks via prompt-based reasoning alone, entirely bypassing the need for parameter updates. Existing theories primarily study ICL in single-task…
Transformers have demonstrated exceptional in-context learning capabilities, yet the theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanisms remains limited. A recent work (Elhage et al., 2021) identified a ``rich'' in-context mechanism…
Large transformer models have been shown to be capable of performing in-context learning. By using examples in a prompt as well as a query, they are capable of performing tasks such as few-shot, one-shot, or zero-shot learning to output the…
Despite the remarkable success of transformer-based models in various real-world tasks, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Recent studies have suggested that transformers can implement gradient descent as an in-context…
In-context learning allows models like transformers to adapt to new tasks from a few examples without updating their weights, a desirable trait for reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing in-context RL methods, such as Algorithm…
Repetition curse is a phenomenon where Large Language Models (LLMs) generate repetitive sequences of tokens or cyclic sequences. While the repetition curse has been widely observed, its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In…
Language models have been shown to perform better with an increase in scale on a wide variety of tasks via the in-context learning paradigm. In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that the ability of a large language model to…
In-context learning (ICL) is a type of prompting where a transformer model operates on a sequence of (input, output) examples and performs inference on-the-fly. In this work, we formalize in-context learning as an algorithm learning problem…
In this paper, I introduce the retrieval problem, a simple yet common reasoning task that can be solved only by transformers with a minimum number of layers, which grows logarithmically with the input size. I empirically show that large…
The current large language models are mainly based on decode-only structure transformers, which have great in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. It is generally believed that the important foundation of its ICL capability is the induction…
In-context learning (ICL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a powerful new learning paradigm. However, its underlying mechanism is still not well understood. In particular, it is challenging to map it to the "standard" machine…
This paper investigates the relationship between large language models' (LLMs) ability to recognize repetitive input patterns and their performance on in-context learning (ICL). In contrast to prior work that has primarily focused on…
In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…
Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…
It has recently been demonstrated empirically that in-context learning emerges in transformers when certain distributional properties are present in the training data, but this ability can also diminish upon further training. We provide a…
In-context learning (ICL) refers to a remarkable capability of pretrained large language models, which can learn a new task given a few examples during inference. However, theoretical understanding of ICL is largely under-explored,…
Humans and animals show remarkable learning efficiency, adapting to new environments with minimal experience. This capability is not well captured by standard reinforcement learning algorithms that rely on incremental value updates. Rapid…
One of the most striking features of Large Language Models (LLMs) is their ability to learn in-context. Namely at inference time an LLM is able to learn new patterns without any additional weight update when these patterns are presented in…
Large language models (LMs) such as GPT-3 have the surprising ability to do in-context learning, where the model learns to do a downstream task simply by conditioning on a prompt consisting of input-output examples. The LM learns from these…
Large language models have the ability to generate text that mimics patterns in their inputs. We introduce a simple Markov Chain sequence modeling task in order to study how this in-context learning (ICL) capability emerges. In our setting,…