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The transformer architecture, which processes sequences of input tokens to produce outputs for query tokens, has revolutionized numerous areas of machine learning. A defining feature of transformers is their ability to perform previously…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Hongbo Li , Lingjie Duan , Yingbin Liang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive datasets and later instruction-tuned via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). Best practices emphasize large, diverse pretraining data, whereas post-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Adel Javanmard , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Vahab Mirrokni

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Chi Han , Ziqi Wang , Han Zhao , Heng Ji

The appearance of transformer-based models in Reinforcement Learning (RL) has expanded the horizons of possibilities in robotics tasks, but it has simultaneously brought a wide range of challenges during its implementation, especially in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Daniil Zelezetsky , Alexey K. Kovalev , Aleksandr I. Panov

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) studies agents that, after pretraining, adapt to new tasks by conditioning on additional context without parameter updates. Existing theoretical analyses of ICRL largely rely on linear attention,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Claire Chen , Shuze Daniel Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Omar Naim , Guilhem Fouilhé , Nicholas Asher

Recent advancements in language models have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning abilities, prompting the exploration of in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) to extend the promise to decision domains. Due to involving more…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Jinmei Liu , Fuhong Liu , Zhenhong Sun , Jianye Hao , Huaxiong Li , Bo Wang , Daoyi Dong , Chunlin Chen , Zhi Wang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a near-optimal policy using pre-collected datasets. In real-world scenarios, data collection could be costly and risky; therefore, offline RL becomes particularly challenging when the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Ruizhe Shi , Yuyao Liu , Yanjie Ze , Simon S. Du , Huazhe Xu

The recent success of supervised learning methods on ever larger offline datasets has spurred interest in the reinforcement learning (RL) field to investigate whether the same paradigms can be translated to RL algorithms. This research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Mengjiao Yang , Ofir Nachum

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Taejong Joo , Diego Klabjan

Large pre-trained sequence models, such as transformer-based architectures, have been recently shown to have the capacity to carry out in-context learning (ICL). In ICL, a decision on a new input is made via a direct mapping of the input…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Matteo Zecchin , Kai Yu , Osvaldo Simeone

Transformers exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where these models solve new tasks by using examples in the prompt without additional training. In our work, we identify and analyze two key components of ICL: (1) context-scaling, where model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Amirhesam Abedsoltan , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan , Jingfeng Wu , Mikhail Belkin

In-context learning (ICL) has garnered significant attention for its ability to grasp functions/tasks from demonstrations. Recent studies suggest the presence of a latent task/function vector in LLMs during ICL. Merullo et al. (2024) showed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Dake Bu , Wei Huang , Andi Han , Atsushi Nitanda , Qingfu Zhang , Hau-San Wong , Taiji Suzuki

We introduce Hierarchical Transformers for Meta-Reinforcement Learning (HTrMRL), a powerful online meta-reinforcement learning approach. HTrMRL aims to address the challenge of enabling reinforcement learning agents to perform effectively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Gresa Shala , André Biedenkapp , Josif Grabocka

The binary exponential backoff scheme is widely used in WiFi 7 and still incurs poor throughput performance under dynamic channel environments. Recent model-based approaches (e.g., non-persistent and $p$-persistent CSMA) simply optimize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Shugang Hao , Hongbo Li , Lingjie Duan

In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) represents a promising paradigm for developing generalist agents that learn at inference time through trial-and-error interactions, analogous to how large language models adapt contextually, but with…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Alexander Hsu , Zhaiming Shen , Wenjing Liao , Rongjie Lai

Pretraining reinforcement learning (RL) models on offline datasets is a promising way to improve their training efficiency in online tasks, but challenging due to the inherent mismatch in dynamics and behaviors across various tasks. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Minting Pan , Yitao Zheng , Yunbo Wang , Xiaokang Yang

Transformer models (TMs) have exhibited remarkable in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) capabilities, allowing them to generalize to and improve in previously unseen environments without re-training or fine-tuning. This is typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Weiqin Chen , Xinjie Zhang , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a constraint satisfaction policy by interacting with the environment. We aim to tackle a more challenging problem: learning a safe policy from an offline dataset. We study the offline safe RL problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Zuxin Liu , Zijian Guo , Yihang Yao , Zhepeng Cen , Wenhao Yu , Tingnan Zhang , Ding Zhao