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Related papers: In-context Learning and Induction Heads

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Transformer based language models exhibit intelligent behaviors such as understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, acquiring knowledge, reasoning, planning, reflecting and using tools. This paper explores how their underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-15 Sumeet S. Singh

Transformers are increasingly dominating multi-modal reasoning tasks, such as visual question answering, achieving state-of-the-art results thanks to their ability to contextualize information using the self-attention and co-attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Hila Chefer , Shir Gur , Lior Wolf

Transformer-based models have been achieving state-of-the-art results in several fields of Natural Language Processing. However, its direct application to speech tasks is not trivial. The nature of this sequences carries problems such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Gerard Sant , Gerard I. Gállego , Belen Alastruey , Marta R. Costa-Jussà

In-context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability alongside the development of scaled-up large language models (LLMs). By instructing LLMs using few-shot demonstrative examples, ICL enables them to perform a wide range of tasks…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Quanyu Long , Yin Wu , Wenya Wang , Sinno Jialin Pan

In-context learning enables large language models to perform novel tasks through few-shot demonstrations. However, demonstrations per se can naturally contain noise and conflicting examples, making this capability vulnerable. To understand…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Difan Jiao , Di Wang , Lijie Hu

Transformer-based language models excel at in-context learning (ICL), where they can adapt to new tasks based on contextual examples, without parameter updates. In a specific form of ICL, which we refer to as \textit{contextual recall},…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Bhavya Vasudeva , Puneesh Deora , Alberto Bietti , Vatsal Sharan , Christos Thrampoulidis

Transformers have emerged as the dominant architecture in the field of deep learning, with a broad range of applications and remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. While not yet fully understood, ICL has already proved to be an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Arik Reuter , Tim G. J. Rudner , Vincent Fortuin , David Rügamer

Large language models based on the Transformer architecture have demonstrated impressive capabilities to learn in context. However, existing theoretical studies on how this phenomenon arises are limited to the dynamics of a single layer of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-04 Juno Kim , Taiji Suzuki

Understanding in-context learning (ICL) capability that enables large language models (LLMs) to excel in proficiency through demonstration examples is of utmost importance. This importance stems not only from the better utilization of this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Yuxiang Zhou , Jiazheng Li , Yanzheng Xiang , Hanqi Yan , Lin Gui , Yulan He

Specialized attention heads dubbed induction heads (IHs) have been argued to underlie the remarkable in-context learning capabilities of modern language models; yet, a precise characterization of their emergence, especially in the context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Tatsuya Aoyama , Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox , Nathan Schneider

While large language models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, understandings of such capabilities are still in an early stage, where existing theory and mechanistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Tianyu Guo , Wei Hu , Song Mei , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Silvio Savarese , Yu Bai

The multi-head attention layer is one of the key components of the transformer architecture that sets it apart from traditional feed-forward models. Given a sequence length $k$, attention matrices…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Sitan Chen , Yuanzhi Li

Pretraining Neural Language Models (NLMs) over a large corpus involves chunking the text into training examples, which are contiguous text segments of sizes processable by the neural architecture. We highlight a bias introduced by this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Yoav Levine , Noam Wies , Daniel Jannai , Dan Navon , Yedid Hoshen , Amnon Shashua

Transformers have demonstrated a strong ability for in-context learning (ICL), enabling models to solve previously unseen tasks using only example input output pairs provided at inference time. While prior theoretical work has established…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Rushil Chandrupatla , Leo Bangayan , Sebastian Leng

Our paper challenges claims from prior research that transformer-based models, when learning in context, implicitly implement standard learning algorithms. We present empirical evidence inconsistent with this view and provide a mathematical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-10 Omar Naim , Jerome Bolte , Nicholas Asher

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is known to improve Large Language Models both empirically and in terms of theoretical approximation power. However, our understanding of the inner workings and conditions of apparition of CoT capabilities…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Vivien Cabannes , Charles Arnal , Wassim Bouaziz , Alice Yang , Francois Charton , Julia Kempe

Transformers have achieved great success across a wide range of applications, yet the theoretical foundations underlying their success remain largely unexplored. To demystify the strong capacities of transformers applied to versatile…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Chenyang Zhang , Qingyue Zhao , Quanquan Gu , Yuan Cao

Sequence modelling requires determining which past tokens are causally relevant from the context and their importance: a process inherent to the attention layers in transformers, yet whose underlying learned mechanisms remain poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Francesco D'Angelo , Nicolas Flammarion

Large language models (LLMs) process entire input contexts indiscriminately, which is inefficient when the information required to answer a query is localized within the context. We present dynamic context cutoff, a novel method enabling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Roy Xie , Junlin Wang , Paul Rosu , Chunyuan Deng , Bolun Sun , Zihao Lin , Bhuwan Dhingra

Transformers can under some circumstances generalize to novel problem instances whose constituent parts might have been encountered during training, but whose compositions have not. What mechanisms underlie this ability for compositional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Simon Schug , Seijin Kobayashi , Yassir Akram , João Sacramento , Razvan Pascanu