Related papers: Transformers learn through gradual rank increase
Low-rank structure is a common implicit assumption in many modern reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. For instance, reward-free and goal-conditioned RL methods often presume that the successor measure admits a low-rank representation.…
The remarkable capability of over-parameterised neural networks to generalise effectively has been explained by invoking a ``simplicity bias'': neural networks prevent overfitting by initially learning simple classifiers before progressing…
Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in language modeling tasks. However, the reasons behind their tremendous success are still unclear. In this paper, towards a better understanding, we train a Transformer model on a…
The remarkable capability of Transformers to do reasoning and few-shot learning, without any fine-tuning, is widely conjectured to stem from their ability to implicitly simulate a multi-step algorithms -- such as gradient descent -- with…
Transformers have shown a remarkable ability for in-context learning (ICL), making predictions based on contextual examples. However, while theoretical analyses have explored this prediction capability, the nature of the inferred context…
Transformers have achieved remarkable success in several domains, ranging from natural language processing to computer vision. Nevertheless, it has been recently shown that stacking self-attention layers - the distinctive architectural…
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.…
Training large transformer models from scratch for a target task requires lots of data and is computationally demanding. The usual practice of transfer learning overcomes this challenge by initializing the model with weights of a pretrained…
In the pursuit of reducing the number of trainable parameters in deep transformer networks, we employ Reinforcement Learning to dynamically select layers during training and tie them together. Every few iterations, the RL agent is asked…
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…
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…
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…
Training deep neural networks results in strong learned representations that show good generalization capabilities. In most cases, training involves iterative modification of all weights inside the network via back-propagation. In Extreme…
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…
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) trained on low-dimensional tasks have been widely used to model functional biological networks. However, the solutions found by learning and the effect of initial connectivity are not well understood. Here,…
Transformers have demonstrated impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, raising the question of whether they can serve as metalearners that adapt to new tasks using only a small number of in-context examples, without any further…
Trained transformer models have been found to implement interpretable procedures for tasks like arithmetic and associative recall, but little is understood about how the circuits that implement these procedures originate during training. To…
Transformers trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) with outcome-based supervision can spontaneously develop the ability to generate intermediate reasoning steps (Chain-of-Thought). Yet the mechanism by which sparse rewards drive policy…
Contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful framework for learning generalizable representations, yet its theoretical understanding remains limited, particularly under imbalanced data distributions that are prevalent in real-world…
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…