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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

The performance of machine learning model can be further improved if contextual cues are provided as input along with base features that are directly related to an inference task. In offline learning, one can inspect historical training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-21 Kin Gwn Lore , Kishore K. Reddy

Autoregressive Transformers adopted in Large Language Models (LLMs) are hard to scale to long sequences. Despite several works trying to reduce their computational cost, most of LLMs still adopt attention layers between all pairs of tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Sotiris Anagnostidis , Dario Pavllo , Luca Biggio , Lorenzo Noci , Aurelien Lucchi , Thomas Hofmann

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

Large autoregressive models like Transformers can solve tasks through in-context learning (ICL) without learning new weights, suggesting avenues for efficiently solving new tasks. For many tasks, e.g., linear regression, the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Sarthak Mittal , Eric Elmoznino , Leo Gagnon , Sangnie Bhardwaj , Tom Marty , Dhanya Sridhar , Guillaume Lajoie

This dissertation establishes the contexture theory to mathematically characterize the mechanism of representation learning, or pretraining. Despite the remarkable empirical success of foundation models, it is not very clear what…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Runtian Zhai

The compositional generalization abilities of neural models have been sought after for human-like linguistic competence. The popular method to evaluate such abilities is to assess the models' input-output behavior. However, that does not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Ryoma Kumon , Hitomi Yanaka

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

In-context learning, i.e., learning from context examples, is an impressive ability of Transformer. Training Transformers to possess this in-context learning skill is computationally intensive due to the occurrence of learning plateaus,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Jingwen Fu , Tao Yang , Yuwang Wang , Yan Lu , Nanning Zheng

Transformer based models have shown remarkable capabilities in sequence learning across a wide range of tasks, often performing well on specific task by leveraging input-output examples. Despite their empirical success, a comprehensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Yifan Hao , Chenlu Ye , Chi Han , Tong Zhang

It has recently been demonstrated empirically that in-context learning emerges in transformers when certain distributional properties are present in the training data, but this ability can also diminish upon further training. We provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Bryan Chan , Xinyi Chen , András György , Dale Schuurmans

In-context learning (ICL) allows Transformers to adapt to novel tasks without weight updates, yet the underlying algorithms remain poorly understood. We adopt a statistical decision-theoretic perspective by investigating simple binary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Faris Chaudhry , Siddhant Gadkari

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

We explore how to enhance next-token prediction models to perform in-context imitation learning on a real robot, where the robot executes new tasks by interpreting contextual information provided during the input phase, without updating its…

Transformers have been successfully applied to sequential, auto-regressive tasks despite being feedforward networks. Unlike recurrent neural networks, Transformers use attention to capture temporal relations while processing input tokens in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-26 Angela Fan , Thibaut Lavril , Edouard Grave , Armand Joulin , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar

We study in-context learning for nonparametric regression with $\alpha$-H\"older smooth regression functions, for some $\alpha>0$. We prove that, with $n$ in-context examples and $d$-dimensional regression covariates, a pretrained…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-20 Michelle Ching , Ioana Popescu , Nico Smith , Tianyi Ma , William G. Underwood , Richard J. Samworth

Topology optimization enables the design of highly efficient and complex structures, but conventional iterative methods, such as SIMP-based approaches, often suffer from high computational costs and sensitivity to initial conditions.…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Aaron Lutheran , Srijan Das , Alireza Tabarraei

We consider stochastic convex optimization problems, where several machines act asynchronously in parallel while sharing a common memory. We propose a robust training method for the constrained setting and derive non asymptotic convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Rotem Zamir Aviv , Ido Hakimi , Assaf Schuster , Kfir Y. Levy

Transformer-based models have demonstrated their effectiveness in automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks and even shown superior performance over the conventional hybrid framework. The main idea of Transformers is to capture the…

Sound · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Kun Wei , Pengcheng Guo , Ning Jiang

Evolutionary optimization algorithms are often derived from loose biological analogies and struggle to leverage information obtained during the sequential course of optimization. An alternative promising approach is to leverage data and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Robert Tjarko Lange , Yingtao Tian , Yujin Tang