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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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Antony Zhao , Alex Proshkin , Fergal Hennessy , Francesco Crivelli

While conventional Transformers generally operate on sequence data, they can be used in conjunction with structure models, typically SE(3)-invariant or equivariant graph neural networks (GNNs), for 3D applications such as protein structure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Isaac Ellmen , Constantin Schneider , Matthew I. J. Raybould , Charlotte M. Deane

The self-attention mechanism, a cornerstone of Transformer-based state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, is largely heuristic-driven and fundamentally challenging to interpret. Establishing a robust theoretical foundation to explain…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Laziz U. Abdullaev , Maksim Tkachenko , Tan M. Nguyen

Deep learning's successes are often attributed to its ability to automatically discover new representations of the data, rather than relying on handcrafted features like other learning methods. We show, however, that deep networks learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Pedro Domingos

We introduce a novel, training-free approach for enhancing alignment in Transformer-based Text-Guided Diffusion Models (TGDMs). Existing TGDMs often struggle to generate semantically aligned images, particularly when dealing with complex…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Shulei Wang , Wang Lin , Hai Huang , Hanting Wang , Sihang Cai , WenKang Han , Tao Jin , Jingyuan Chen , Jiacheng Sun , Jieming Zhu , Zhou Zhao

Transformers have proven highly effective across various applications, especially in handling sequential data such as natural languages and time series. However, transformer models often lack clear interpretability, and the success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Wei Shi , Yuan Cao

There has been an explosion of interest in designing high-performance Transformers. While Transformers have delivered significant performance improvements, training such networks is extremely memory intensive owing to storing all…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Zizheng Pan , Peng Chen , Haoyu He , Jing Liu , Jianfei Cai , Bohan Zhuang

Recently, Transformer has achieved the state-of-the-art performance on many machine translation tasks. However, without syntax knowledge explicitly considered in the encoder, incorrect context information that violates the syntax structure…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-06 Chengyi Wang , Shuangzhi Wu , Shujie Liu

We investigate the mechanisms that arise when transformers are trained to solve arithmetic on sequences where tokens are variables whose meaning is determined only through their interactions in-context. While prior work has studied…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Eric Todd , Jannik Brinkmann , Rohit Gandikota , David Bau

Understanding the training dynamics of transformers is important to explain the impressive capabilities behind large language models. In this work, we study the dynamics of training a shallow transformer on a task of recognizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Hongru Yang , Bhavya Kailkhura , Zhangyang Wang , Yingbin Liang

Transformers excel at discovering patterns in sequential data, yet their fundamental limitations and learning mechanisms remain crucial topics of investigation. In this paper, we study the ability of Transformers to learn pseudo-random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Tao Tao , Darshil Doshi , Dayal Singh Kalra , Tianyu He , Maissam Barkeshli

In recent years, deep learning has facilitated the creation of wireless receivers capable of functioning effectively in conditions that challenge traditional model-based designs. Leveraging programmable hardware architectures, deep…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Matteo Zecchin , Tomer Raviv , Dileep Kalathil , Krishna Narayanan , Nir Shlezinger , Osvaldo Simeone

Recent advancements in attention mechanisms have replaced recurrent neural networks and its variants for machine translation tasks. Transformer using attention mechanism solely achieved state-of-the-art results in sequence modeling. Neural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Prakhar Thapak , Prodip Hore

This thesis investigates two key phenomena in large language models (LLMs): in-context learning (ICL) and model collapse. We study ICL in a linear transformer with tied weights trained on linear regression tasks, and show that minimising…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Josef Ott

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multi-step reasoning tasks. However, understandings of the underlying mechanisms by which they acquire these abilities through training remain limited, particularly from a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Tong Yang , Yu Huang , Yingbin Liang , Yuejie Chi

Transformers have exhibited exceptional capabilities in sequence modeling tasks, leveraging self-attention and in-context learning. Critical to this success are induction heads, attention circuits that enable copying tokens based on their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Francesco D'Angelo , Francesco Croce , Nicolas Flammarion

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are the dominant architecture for molecular machine learning, particularly for molecular property prediction and machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs). GNNs perform message passing on predefined graphs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Tobias Kreiman , Yutong Bai , Fadi Atieh , Elizabeth Weaver , Eric Qu , Aditi S. Krishnapriyan

While convolutional neural networks have shown a tremendous impact on various computer vision tasks, they generally demonstrate limitations in explicitly modeling long-range dependencies due to the intrinsic locality of the convolution…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-08-06 Guanglei Yang , Hao Tang , Mingli Ding , Nicu Sebe , Elisa Ricci

Transformer models have achieved remarkable empirical successes, largely due to their in-context learning capabilities. Inspired by this, we explore training an autoregressive transformer for in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL). In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Juncheng Dong , Moyang Guo , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Vahid Tarokh

Transformer-based language models exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where predictions are made adaptively based on context. While prior work links induction heads to ICL through a sudden jump in accuracy, this can only account for ICL when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Gouki Minegishi , Hiroki Furuta , Shohei Taniguchi , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo