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Related papers: Transformers learn in-context by gradient descent

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In-context learning with attention enables large neural networks to make context-specific predictions by selectively focusing on relevant examples. Here, we adapt this idea to supervised learning procedures such as lasso regression and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-11 Erin Craig , Robert Tibshirani

Models based on the Transformer neural network architecture have seen success on a wide variety of tasks that appear to require complex "cognitive branching" -- or the ability to maintain pursuit of one goal while accomplishing others. In…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Aaron Traylor , Jack Merullo , Michael J. Frank , Ellie Pavlick

Transformers have become the dominant architecture in modern machine learning, yet the theoretical understanding of their training dynamics remains limited. This paper develops a rigorous mathematical framework for analyzing gradient-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Raphaël Barboni , Maarten V. de Hoop , Takashi Furuya , Gabriel Peyré

We establish connections between the Transformer architecture, originally introduced for natural language processing, and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for representation learning on graphs. We show how Transformers can be viewed as message…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Chaitanya K. Joshi

With the recent successful adaptation of transformers to the vision domain, particularly when trained in a self-supervised fashion, it has been shown that vision transformers can learn impressive object-reasoning-like behaviour and features…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-10-26 Oscar Vikström , Alexander Ilin

Scaling large language models (LLMs) leads to an emergent capacity to learn in-context from example demonstrations. Despite progress, theoretical understanding of this phenomenon remains limited. We argue that in-context learning relies on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Michael Hahn , Navin Goyal

Large language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning, where they learn to solve tasks given a few examples. Recent work has shown that transformers can be trained to perform simple regression tasks in-context. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Hrayr Harutyunyan , Rafayel Darbinyan , Samvel Karapetyan , Hrant Khachatrian

People interact with the real-world largely dependent on visual signal, which are ubiquitous and illustrate detailed demonstrations. In this paper, we explore utilizing visual signals as a new interface for models to interact with the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Wentao Zhang , Junliang Guo , Tianyu He , Li Zhao , Linli Xu , Jiang Bian

Predicting simple function classes has been widely used as a testbed for developing theory and understanding of the trained Transformer's in-context learning (ICL) ability. In this paper, we revisit the training of Transformers on linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Shang Liu , Zhongze Cai , Guanting Chen , Xiaocheng Li

Meta-learning is a branch of machine learning which aims to quickly adapt models, such as neural networks, to perform new tasks by learning an underlying structure across related tasks. In essence, models are being trained to learn new…

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

The Transformer is a highly successful deep learning model that has revolutionised the world of artificial neural networks, first in natural language processing and later in computer vision. This model is based on the attention mechanism…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Riccardo Ughi , Eugenio Lomurno , Matteo Matteucci

Traditionally, reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn to solve new tasks by updating their neural network parameters through interactions with the task environment. However, recent works demonstrate that some RL agents, after certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Jiuqi Wang , Ethan Blaser , Hadi Daneshmand , Shangtong Zhang

Graph Transformers, which incorporate self-attention and positional encoding, have recently emerged as a powerful architecture for various graph learning tasks. Despite their impressive performance, the complex non-convex interactions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Hongkang Li , Meng Wang , Tengfei Ma , Sijia Liu , Zaixi Zhang , Pin-Yu Chen

In this work, we explore the mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks that were not encountered during training. To achieve this, we conduct synthetic experiments where the objective is to learn OOD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Qixun Wang , Yifei Wang , Yisen Wang , Xianghua Ying

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Tiberiu Musat

Although transformer-based models have shown exceptional empirical performance, the fundamental principles governing their training dynamics are inadequately characterized beyond configuration-specific studies. Inspired by empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Zheng-An Chen , Tao Luo

Transformers have gained increasing popularity in a wide range of applications, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision and Speech Recognition, because of their powerful representational capacity. However, harnessing…

Regression models often fail to generalize effectively in regions characterized by highly imbalanced label distributions. Previous methods for deep imbalanced regression rely on gradient-based weight updates, which tend to overfit in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Ismail Nejjar , Faez Ahmed , Olga Fink

Dynamic graph learning plays a pivotal role in modeling evolving relationships over time, especially for temporal link prediction tasks in domains such as traffic systems, social networks, and recommendation platforms. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Tao Zou , Chengfeng Wu , Tianxi Liao , Junchen Ye , Bowen Du