English
Related papers

Related papers: Transformers Implement Functional Gradient Descent…

200 papers

Transformers have shown a remarkable ability for in-context learning (ICL), making predictions based on contextual examples. However, while theoretical analyses have explored this prediction capability, the nature of the inferred context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Fei Lu , Yue Yu

Recent studies show that transformer-based architectures emulate gradient descent during a forward pass, contributing to in-context learning capabilities - an ability where the model adapts to new tasks based on a sequence of prompt…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-05-13 Karthik Duraisamy

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Arik Reuter , Tim G. J. Rudner , Vincent Fortuin , David Rügamer

We address the challenging problem of deep representation learning--the efficient adaption of a pre-trained deep network to different tasks. Specifically, we propose to explore gradient-based features. These features are gradients of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Fangzhou Mu , Yingyu Liang , Yin Li

This paper explores learned-context neural networks. It is a multi-task learning architecture based on a fully shared neural network and an augmented input vector containing trainable task parameters. The architecture is interesting due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Anders T. Sandnes , Bjarne Grimstad , Odd Kolbjørnsen

Despite the fact that Transformers perform well in NLP tasks, recent studies suggest that self-attention is theoretically limited in learning even some regular and context-free languages. These findings motivated us to think about their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Shunjie Wang , Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

Exploiting data invariances is crucial for efficient learning in both artificial and biological neural circuits. Understanding how neural networks can discover appropriate representations capable of harnessing the underlying symmetries of…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2022-10-17 Alessandro Ingrosso , Sebastian Goldt

Humans and animals show remarkable learning efficiency, adapting to new environments with minimal experience. This capability is not well captured by standard reinforcement learning algorithms that rely on incremental value updates. Rapid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ching Fang , Kanaka Rajan

A long-standing goal in deep learning has been to characterize the learning behavior of black-box models in a more interpretable manner. For graph neural networks (GNNs), considerable advances have been made in formalizing what functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Chenxiao Yang , Qitian Wu , David Wipf , Ruoyu Sun , Junchi Yan

Using transformers over large generated datasets, we train models to learn mathematical properties of differential systems, such as local stability, behavior at infinity and controllability. We achieve near perfect prediction of qualitative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-22 François Charton , Amaury Hayat , Guillaume Lample

Deep learning's successes are often attributed to its ability to automatically discover new representations of the data, rather than relying on handcrafted features like other learning methods. We show, however, that deep networks learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Pedro Domingos

Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Yuxuan Li , James L. McClelland

The transformer architecture has prevailed in various deep learning settings due to its exceptional capabilities to select and compose structural information. Motivated by these capabilities, Sanford et al. proposed the sparse token…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-12 Zixuan Wang , Stanley Wei , Daniel Hsu , Jason D. Lee

Linear networks provide valuable insights into the workings of neural networks in general. This paper identifies conditions under which the gradient flow provably trains a linear network, in spite of the non-strict saddle points present in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-30 Armin Eftekhari

We introduce inverse transport networks as a learning architecture for inverse rendering problems where, given input image measurements, we seek to infer physical scene parameters such as shape, material, and illumination. During training,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-10-01 Chengqian Che , Fujun Luan , Shuang Zhao , Kavita Bala , Ioannis Gkioulekas

One of the most striking features of Large Language Models (LLMs) is their ability to learn in-context. Namely at inference time an LLM is able to learn new patterns without any additional weight update when these patterns are presented in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Benoit Dherin , Michael Munn , Hanna Mazzawi , Michael Wunder , Javier Gonzalvo

Transformers often fail to learn generalizable algorithms, instead relying on brittle heuristics. Using graph connectivity as a testbed, we explain this phenomenon both theoretically and empirically. We consider a simplified Transformer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Qilin Ye , Deqing Fu , Robin Jia , Vatsal Sharan

State-of-the-art rehearsal-free continual learning methods exploit the peculiarities of Vision Transformers to learn task-specific prompts, drastically reducing catastrophic forgetting. However, there is a tradeoff between the number of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Thomas De Min , Massimiliano Mancini , Karteek Alahari , Xavier Alameda-Pineda , Elisa Ricci

Transformers are deep architectures that define "in-context mappings" which enable predicting new tokens based on a given set of tokens (such as a prompt in NLP applications or a set of patches for a vision transformer). In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Takashi Furuya , Maarten V. de Hoop , Gabriel Peyré

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Sarthak Mittal , Eric Elmoznino , Leo Gagnon , Sangnie Bhardwaj , Tom Marty , Dhanya Sridhar , Guillaume Lajoie