Related papers: What and How does In-Context Learning Learn? Bayes…
In-context learning (ICL) is one of the surprising and useful features of large language models and subject of intense research. Recently, stylized meta-learning-like ICL setups have been devised that train transformers on sequences of…
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…
Recent work analyzing in-context learning (ICL) has identified a broad set of strategies that describe model behavior in different experimental conditions. We aim to unify these findings by asking why a model learns these disparate…
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…
In-context learning (ICL) refers to a remarkable capability of pretrained large language models, which can learn a new task given a few examples during inference. However, theoretical understanding of ICL is largely under-explored,…
In-context learning (ICL) of large language models has proven to be a surprisingly effective method of learning a new task from only a few demonstrative examples. In this paper, we study the efficacy of ICL from the viewpoint of statistical…
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…
In-context learning (ICL) is a type of prompting where a transformer model operates on a sequence of (input, output) examples and performs inference on-the-fly. In this work, we formalize in-context learning as an algorithm learning problem…
In-context learning (ICL) is a key building block of modern large language models, yet its theoretical mechanisms remain poorly understood. It is particularly mysterious how ICL operates in real-world applications where tasks have a common…
In-context learning (ICL) derives its power from enabling Large Language Models to adapt to new tasks via prompt-based reasoning alone, entirely bypassing the need for parameter updates. Existing theories primarily study ICL in single-task…
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…
In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for easily adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to various tasks. However, our understanding of how ICL works remains limited. We explore a simple model of ICL in a controlled…
Transformer-based large language models have displayed impressive in-context learning capabilities, where a pre-trained model can handle new tasks without fine-tuning by simply augmenting the query with some input-output examples from that…
This paper develops a finite-sample statistical theory for in-context learning (ICL), analyzed within a meta-learning framework that accommodates mixtures of diverse task types. We introduce a principled risk decomposition that separates…
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…
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…
Transformer neural networks can exhibit a surprising capacity for in-context learning (ICL) despite not being explicitly trained for it. Prior work has provided a deeper understanding of how ICL emerges in transformers, e.g. through the…
Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 utilize the powerful in-context learning (ICL) capability of Transformer architecture to learn on the fly from limited examples. While ICL underpins many LLM applications, its full…
In-context learning (ICL) is a remarkable capability of pretrained transformers that allows models to generalize to unseen tasks after seeing only a few examples. We investigate empirically the conditions necessary on the pretraining…
Neural sequence models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable \emph{in-context learning} (ICL) abilities, where they can perform new tasks when prompted with training and test examples, without any parameter…