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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…
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…
We learn recurrent neural network optimizers trained on simple synthetic functions by gradient descent. We show that these learned optimizers exhibit a remarkable degree of transfer in that they can be used to efficiently optimize a broad…
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…
Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. The strong ICL performance of transformers is commonly believed to arise from their ability to implicitly execute certain algorithms on the context, thereby…
Despite the remarkable success of transformer-based models in various real-world tasks, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Recent studies have suggested that transformers can implement gradient descent as an in-context…
Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…
Natural gradient descent is a principled method for adapting the parameters of a statistical model on-line using an underlying Riemannian parameter space to redefine the direction of steepest descent. The algorithm is examined via methods…
Large language models are capable of in-context learning, the ability to perform new tasks at test time using a handful of input-output examples, without parameter updates. We develop a universal approximation theory to elucidate how…
Transformers have become the dominant architecture for sequence modeling tasks such as natural language processing or audio processing, and they are now even considered for tasks that are not naturally sequential such as image…
Transformers have achieved great success in recent years. Interestingly, transformers have shown particularly strong in-context learning capability -- even without fine-tuning, they are still able to solve unseen tasks well purely based on…
Convolutional Neural Networks define an exceptionally powerful class of models, but are still limited by the lack of ability to be spatially invariant to the input data in a computationally and parameter efficient manner. In this work we…
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…
We investigate the ability of transformers to perform in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL), where a model must infer and execute learning algorithms from trajectory data without parameter updates. We show that a linear self-attention…
Transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning capabilities, prompting extensive research into its underlying mechanisms. Recent studies have suggested that Transformers can implement first-order optimization…
Transformers excel at in-context learning (ICL) -- learning from demonstrations without parameter updates -- but how they do so remains a mystery. Recent work suggests that Transformers may internally run Gradient Descent (GD), a…
In this paper, we introduce a novel concept for learning of the parameters in a neural network. Our idea is grounded on modeling a learning problem that addresses a trade-off between (i) satisfying local objectives at each node and (ii)…
Transformer-based models demonstrate a remarkable ability for in-context learning (ICL), where they can adapt to unseen tasks from a few prompt examples without parameter updates. Recent research has illuminated how Transformers perform…
We establish connections between the Transformer architecture, originally introduced for natural language processing, and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for representation learning on graphs. We show how Transformers can be viewed as message…
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…