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Transformers have proven highly effective across various applications, especially in handling sequential data such as natural languages and time series. However, transformer models often lack clear interpretability, and the success of…
The transformer's remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) has sparked a wide range of studies designed to understand its strengths and limitations. However, a theoretical understanding of when ICL can and cannot generalize…
Despite the advancements in in-context learning (ICL) for large language models (LLMs), current research centers on specific prompt engineering, such as demonstration selection, with the expectation that a single iteration of demonstrations…
A striking property of transformers is their ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), a machine learning framework in which the learner is presented with a novel context during inference implicitly through some data, and tasked with…
This paper investigates approximation-theoretic aspects of the in-context learning capability of the transformers in representing a family of noisy linear dynamical systems. Our first theoretical result establishes an upper bound on the…
The gradient descent (GD) method -- is a fundamental and likely the most popular optimization algorithm in machine learning (ML), with a history traced back to a paper in 1847 (Cauchy, 1847). It was studied under various assumptions,…
Differentially private (stochastic) gradient descent is the workhorse of DP private machine learning in both the convex and non-convex settings. Without privacy constraints, second-order methods, like Newton's method, converge faster than…
One of the mysteries in the success of neural networks is randomly initialized first order methods like gradient descent can achieve zero training loss even though the objective function is non-convex and non-smooth. This paper demystifies…
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved great success on grid-like data such as images, but face tremendous challenges in learning from more generic data such as graphs. In CNNs, the trainable local filters enable the automatic…
This work studies the global convergence and implicit bias of Gauss Newton's (GN) when optimizing over-parameterized one-hidden layer networks in the mean-field regime. We first establish a global convergence result for GN in the…
In-context learning (ICL), the remarkable ability to solve a task from only input exemplars, is often assumed to be a unique hallmark of Transformer models. By examining commonly employed synthetic ICL tasks, we demonstrate that multi-layer…
Transformer-based language models exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where predictions are made adaptively based on context. While prior work links induction heads to ICL through a sudden jump in accuracy, this can only account for ICL when…
Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of being in-context learners. However, the underlying mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) is still a major research question, and experimental research results about how models exploit…
Arguably the biggest challenge in applying neural networks is tuning the hyperparameters, in particular the learning rate. The sensitivity to the learning rate is due to the reliance on backpropagation to train the network. In this paper we…
In-context learning (ICL) allows large language models (LLMs) to solve novel tasks without weight updates. Despite its empirical success, the mechanism behind ICL remains poorly understood, limiting our ability to interpret, improve, and…
We argue that in-context learning (ICL) predictably arises from standard self-supervised next-token pretraining, rather than being an exotic emergent property. This work establishes the foundational principles of this emergence by focusing…
Transformers demonstrate significant advantages as the building block of modern LLMs. In this work, we study the capacities of Transformers in performing unsupervised learning. We show that multi-layered Transformers, given a sufficiently…
While attention-based models have demonstrated the remarkable ability of in-context learning (ICL), the theoretical understanding of how these models acquired this ability through gradient descent training is still preliminary. Towards…
Due to its empirical success in few-shot classification and reinforcement learning, meta-learning has recently received significant interest. Meta-learning methods leverage data from previous tasks to learn a new task in a sample-efficient…
Autoregressive transformers exhibit adaptive learning through in-context learning (ICL), which begs the question of how. Prior works have shown that transformers represent the ICL tasks as vectors in their representations. In this paper, we…