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Attention-based models are successful when trained on large amounts of data. In this paper, we demonstrate that even in the low-resource scenario, attention can be learned effectively. To this end, we start with discrete human-annotated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-08-29 Yujia Bao , Shiyu Chang , Mo Yu , Regina Barzilay

Encoder transformer models compress information from all tokens in a sequence into a single [CLS] token to represent global context. This approach risks diluting fine-grained or hierarchical features, leading to information loss in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Asif Shahriar , Rifat Shahriyar , M Saifur Rahman

Large language models (LLMs) have initiated a paradigm shift in transfer learning. In contrast to the classic pretraining-then-finetuning procedure, in order to use LLMs for downstream prediction tasks, one only needs to provide a few…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Chi Han , Ziqi Wang , Han Zhao , Heng Ji

Transformers have become the go-to architecture for language and vision tasks, yet their theoretical properties, especially memorization capacity, remain elusive. This paper investigates the memorization abilities of multi-head attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Sadegh Mahdavi , Renjie Liao , Christos Thrampoulidis

Adapting one's thought process based on corrective feedback is an essential ability in human learning, particularly in collaborative settings. In contrast, the current large language model training paradigm relies heavily on modeling vast,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Martin Klissarov , Jonathan Cook , Diego Antognini , Hao Sun , Jingling Li , Natasha Jaques , Claudiu Musat , Edward Grefenstette

Understanding the inner workings of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for advancing their theoretical foundations and real-world applications. While the attention mechanism and multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) have been studied…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Clement Neo , Shay B. Cohen , Fazl Barez

In-context learning refers to the emerging ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform a target task without additional training, utilizing demonstrations of the task. Recent studies aim to enhance in-context learning performance by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Junyong Kang , Donghyun Son , Hwanjun Song , Buru Chang

Transformer-based language models have achieved impressive success in various natural language processing tasks due to their ability to capture complex dependencies and contextual information using self-attention mechanisms. However, they…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Kaushik Roy , Yuxin Zi , Vignesh Narayanan , Manas Gaur , Amit Sheth

While attention-based models have demonstrated the remarkable ability of in-context learning (ICL), the theoretical understanding of how these models acquired this ability through gradient descent training is still preliminary. Towards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Yedi Zhang , Aaditya K. Singh , Peter E. Latham , Andrew Saxe

Tabular foundation models have shown strong performance across various tabular learning tasks via in-context learning, offering robust generalization without any downstream finetuning. However, their inference-time costs remain high,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Jaris Küken , Lennart Purucker , Frank Hutter

Attention is a powerful and ubiquitous mechanism for allowing neural models to focus on particular salient pieces of information by taking their weighted average when making predictions. In particular, multi-headed attention is a driving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Paul Michel , Omer Levy , Graham Neubig

In-context Learning (ICL) is an emerging few-shot learning paradigm on Language Models (LMs) with inner mechanisms un-explored. There are already existing works describing the inner processing of ICL, while they struggle to capture all the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Hakaze Cho , Mariko Kato , Yoshihiro Sakai , Naoya Inoue

We present a theoretical analysis of the performance of transformer with softmax attention in in-context learning with linear regression tasks. While the existing literature predominantly focuses on the convergence of transformers with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Yingqian Cui , Jie Ren , Pengfei He , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing

In-context learning is governed by both temporal and semantic relationships, shaping how Large Language Models (LLMs) retrieve contextual information. Analogous to human episodic memory, where the retrieval of specific events is enabled by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Anooshka Bajaj , Deven Mahesh Mistry , Sahaj Singh Maini , Yash Aggarwal , Zoran Tiganj

In recent years, pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable efficiency in achieving an inference-time few-shot learning capability known as in-context learning. However, existing literature has highlighted the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Xinyi Wang , Wanrong Zhu , Michael Saxon , Mark Steyvers , William Yang Wang

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

Large language models (LLMs) can adapt to new tasks via in-context learning (ICL) without parameter updates, making them powerful learning engines for fast adaptation. While extensive research has examined ICL as a few-shot learner, whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Liuwang Kang , Fan Wang , Shaoshan Liu , Hung-Chyun Chou , Chuan Lin , Ning Ding

Attending to what is relevant is fundamental to both the mammalian brain and modern machine learning models such as Transformers. Yet, determining relevance remains a core challenge, traditionally offloaded to learning algorithms like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Ahsan Adeel

Unsupervised meta-learning aims to learn feature representations from unsupervised datasets that can transfer to downstream tasks with limited labeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to unsupervised meta-learning that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Anna Vettoruzzo , Lorenzo Braccaioli , Joaquin Vanschoren , Marlena Nowaczyk

Large language models have exhibited intriguing in-context learning capability, achieving promising zero- and few-shot performance without updating the parameters. However, conventional in-context learning is usually restricted by length…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-14 Yaru Hao , Yutao Sun , Li Dong , Zhixiong Han , Yuxian Gu , Furu Wei