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Related papers: Transformers learn in-context by gradient descent

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Transformers have the capacity to act as supervised learning algorithms: by properly encoding a set of labeled training ("in-context") examples and an unlabeled test example into an input sequence of vectors of the same dimension, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Spencer Frei , Gal Vardi

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

Graph Transformers (GTs) have demonstrated their advantages across a wide range of tasks. However, the self-attention mechanism in GTs overlooks the graph's inductive biases, particularly biases related to structure, which are crucial for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-25 Chuang Liu , Zelin Yao , Yibing Zhan , Xueqi Ma , Shirui Pan , Wenbin Hu

Pre-trained large language models based on Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) abilities. With just a few demonstration examples, the models can implement new tasks without any parameter updates. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Ruifeng Ren , Yong Liu

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

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, adapting to new tasks by simply conditioning on demonstrations without parameter updates. Compelling empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that ICL, as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Taejong Joo , Diego Klabjan

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability of large pretrained transformers, enabling them to solve new tasks implicit in example input-output pairs without any gradient updates. Despite its practical success, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Joshua Hill , Benjamin Eyre , Elliot Creager

Deep learning models such as the Transformer are often constructed by heuristics and experience. To provide a complementary foundation, in this work we study the following problem: Is it possible to find an energy function underlying the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Yongyi Yang , Zengfeng Huang , David Wipf

Meta-learning stands for 'learning to learn' such that generalization to new tasks is achieved. Among these methods, Gradient-based meta-learning algorithms are a specific sub-class that excel at quick adaptation to new tasks with limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Jathushan Rajasegaran , Salman Khan , Munawar Hayat , Fahad Shahbaz Khan , Mubarak Shah

Modern distributed networks, notably transformers, acquire a remarkable ability (termed `in-context learning') to adapt their computation to input statistics, such that a fixed network can be applied to data from a broad range of systems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Cole Gibson , Wenping Cui , Gautam Reddy

Pre-trained transformers are able to learn from examples provided as part of the prompt without any weight updates, a remarkable ability known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite its demonstrated efficacy across various domains, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Alexander Hsu , Zhaiming Shen , Wenjing Liao , Rongjie Lai

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Benoit Dherin , Michael Munn , Hanna Mazzawi , Michael Wunder , Javier Gonzalvo

Large transformer models trained on diverse datasets have shown a remarkable ability to learn in-context, achieving high few-shot performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained to solve. In this paper, we study the in-context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Jonathan N. Lee , Annie Xie , Aldo Pacchiano , Yash Chandak , Chelsea Finn , Ofir Nachum , Emma Brunskill

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

Transformer-based language models are trained on large datasets to predict the next token given an input sequence. Despite this simple training objective, they have led to revolutionary advances in natural language processing. Underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Yingcong Li , Yixiao Huang , M. Emrullah Ildiz , Ankit Singh Rawat , Samet Oymak

Large language models have shown tremendous performance in a variety of tasks. In-context learning -- the ability to improve at a task after being provided with a number of demonstrations -- is seen as one of the main contributors to their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Julian Coda-Forno , Marcel Binz , Zeynep Akata , Matthew Botvinick , Jane X. Wang , Eric Schulz

Recent studies show that transformer-based architectures emulate gradient descent during a forward pass, contributing to in-context learning capabilities - an ability where the model adapts to new tasks based on a sequence of prompt…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-05-13 Karthik Duraisamy

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Mingze Wang , Ruoxi Yu , Weinan E , Lei Wu

This paper presents a novel optimization method for maximizing generalization over tasks in meta-learning. The goal of meta-learning is to learn a model for an agent adapting rapidly when presented with previously unseen tasks. Tasks are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-19 Amir Erfan Eshratifar , David Eigen , Massoud Pedram

Large transformer-based models are able to perform in-context few-shot learning, without being explicitly trained for it. This observation raises the question: what aspects of the training regime lead to this emergent behavior? Here, we…