Related papers: Transformers Learn to Achieve Second-Order Converg…
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…
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…
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…
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…
While first-order optimization methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are popular in machine learning (ML), they come with well-known deficiencies, including relatively-slow convergence, sensitivity to the settings of…
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…
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…
Pretrained Transformers demonstrate remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling them to adapt to new tasks from demonstrations without parameter updates. However, theoretical studies often rely on simplified architectures…
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…
In-context learning (ICL) refers to the ability of a model to condition on a few in-context demonstrations (input-output examples of the underlying task) to generate the answer for a new query input, without updating parameters. Despite the…
In-context learning (ICL) refers to the ability of a model to learn new tasks from examples in its input without any parameter updates. In contrast to previous theories of ICL relying on toy models and data settings, recently it has been…
With sequentially stacked self-attention, (optional) encoder-decoder attention, and feed-forward layers, Transformer achieves big success in natural language processing (NLP), and many variants have been proposed. Currently, almost all…
Transformers can efficiently learn in-context from example demonstrations. Most existing theoretical analyses studied the in-context learning (ICL) ability of transformers for linear function classes, where it is typically shown that the…
Any gradient descent optimization requires to choose a learning rate. With deeper and deeper models, tuning that learning rate can easily become tedious and does not necessarily lead to an ideal convergence. We propose a variation of the…
In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to acquire new behaviors from the input sequence alone without any parameter updates. Recent studies have shown that ICL can surpass the original meaning learned in pretraining…
Transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities, but the mechanisms underlying relational reasoning remain poorly understood. We investigate how transformers perform \textit{transitive inference}, a classic…
Recent work has shown that Transformers can perform in-context learning for linear regression under restrictive assumptions, including i.i.d. data, Gaussian noise, and Gaussian regression coefficients. However, real-world data often violate…
We study the approximation capabilities, convergence speeds and on-convergence behaviors of transformers trained on in-context recall tasks -- which requires to recognize the \emph{positional} association between a pair of tokens from…
In-context learning (ICL) is a cornerstone of large language model (LLM) functionality, yet its theoretical foundations remain elusive due to the complexity of transformer architectures. In particular, most existing work only theoretically…
The incremental gradient method is a prominent algorithm for minimizing a finite sum of smooth convex functions, used in many contexts including large-scale data processing applications and distributed optimization over networks. It is a…