Related papers: Transformers Implement Functional Gradient Descent…
The ability of learning useful features is one of the major advantages of neural networks. Although recent works show that neural network can operate in a neural tangent kernel (NTK) regime that does not allow feature learning, many works…
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…
The incredible success of transformers on sequence modeling tasks can be largely attributed to the self-attention mechanism, which allows information to be transferred between different parts of a sequence. Self-attention allows…
Transformer-based models have transformed the landscape of natural language processing (NLP) and are increasingly applied to computer vision tasks with remarkable success. These models, renowned for their ability to capture long-range…
Training autonomous agents that can learn new tasks from only a handful of demonstrations is a long-standing problem in machine learning. Recently, transformers have been shown to learn new language or vision tasks without any weight…
While large language models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, understandings of such capabilities are still in an early stage, where existing theory and mechanistic…
Transformers have demonstrated remarkable success across various applications. However, the success of transformers have not been understood in theory. In this work, we give a case study of how transformers can be trained to learn a classic…
Transformer based language models exhibit intelligent behaviors such as understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, acquiring knowledge, reasoning, planning, reflecting and using tools. This paper explores how their underlying…
Transformer-based large language models have displayed impressive in-context learning capabilities, where a pre-trained model can handle new tasks without fine-tuning by simply augmenting the query with some input-output examples from that…
Non-stationary sequences arise naturally in control, forecasting, and decision-making. The data-generating process shifts at unknown times, and models must detect the change, discard or downweight obsolete evidence, and adapt to new…
Behavioral changes in animals and humans, as a consequence of an error or a verbal instruction, can be extremely rapid. Improvement in behavioral performances are usually associated in machine learning and reinforcement learning to synaptic…
Attention-based neural networks such as transformers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to exhibit in-context learning (ICL): Given a short prompt sequence of tokens from an unseen task, they can formulate relevant per-token and…
Research in machine learning has polarized into two general approaches for regression tasks: Transductive methods construct estimates directly from available data but are usually problem unspecific. Inductive methods can be much more…
Modern machine learning requires system designers to specify aspects of the learning pipeline, such as losses, architectures, and optimizers. Meta-learning, or learning-to-learn, instead aims to learn those aspects, and promises to unlock…
Despite their original goal to jointly learn to align and translate, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, especially Transformer, are often perceived as not learning interpretable word alignments. In this paper, we show that NMT models…
Our paper challenges claims from prior research that transformer-based models, when learning in context, implicitly implement standard learning algorithms. We present empirical evidence inconsistent with this view and provide a mathematical…
Significant theoretical work has established that in specific regimes, neural networks trained by gradient descent behave like kernel methods. However, in practice, it is known that neural networks strongly outperform their associated…
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…
This paper presents a framework of successive functional gradient optimization for training nonconvex models such as neural networks, where training is driven by mirror descent in a function space. We provide a theoretical analysis and…
Transformer networks are the de facto standard architecture in natural language processing. To date, there are no theoretical analyses of the Transformer's ability to capture tree structures. We focus on the ability of Transformer networks…