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While scaling Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated promising performance across various tasks, it also introduces redundant architectures, posing efficiency challenges for real-world deployment. Despite some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Shwai He , Guoheng Sun , Zheyu Shen , Ang Li

We present a theoretical analysis of the performance of transformer with softmax attention in in-context learning with linear regression tasks. While the existing literature predominantly focuses on the convergence of transformers with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Yingqian Cui , Jie Ren , Pengfei He , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing

Transformer models have emerged as fundamental tools across various scientific and engineering disciplines, owing to their outstanding performance in diverse applications. Despite this empirical success, the theoretical foundations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Zhen Qin , Jinxin Zhou , Jiachen Jiang , Zhihui Zhu

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) studies agents that, after pretraining, adapt to new tasks by conditioning on additional context without parameter updates. Existing theoretical analyses of ICRL largely rely on linear attention,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Claire Chen , Shuze Daniel Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized the field of sequence modeling and underpins the recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs). However, a comprehensive mathematical theory that explains its structure and operations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Xue-Cheng Tai , Hao Liu , Lingfeng Li , Raymond H. Chan

We develop a geometric account of sequence modelling that links patterns in the data to measurable properties of the loss landscape in transformer networks. First, we cast conditional sequence distributions into a Hilbert-space framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Zhongtian Chen , Daniel Murfet

Transformers have achieved remarkable successes across a wide range of applications, yet the theoretical foundation of their model efficiency remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate how the model parameters -- mainly attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Ruoxi Yu , Haotian Jiang , Jingpu Cheng , Penghao Yu , Qianxiao Li , Zhong Li

Attention layers are widely used in natural language processing (NLP) and are beginning to influence computer vision architectures. Training very large transformer models allowed significant improvement in both fields, but once trained,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier , Andreas Loukas , Martin Jaggi

Despite their dominance in modern DL and, especially, NLP domains, transformer architectures exhibit sub-optimal performance on long-range tasks compared to recent layers that are specifically designed for this purpose. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Itamar Zimerman , Lior Wolf

Transductive tasks on graphs differ fundamentally from typical supervised machine learning tasks, as the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) assumption does not hold among samples. Instead, all train/test/validation samples are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Hamed Shirzad , Honghao Lin , Ameya Velingker , Balaji Venkatachalam , David Woodruff , Danica Sutherland

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, adapting to new tasks by simply conditioning on demonstrations without parameter updates. Compelling empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that ICL, as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Taejong Joo , Diego Klabjan

Large language models adapt to new tasks through in-context learning (ICL) without parameter updates. Current theoretical explanations for this capability assume test tasks are drawn from a distribution similar to that seen during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Di Zhang

In this paper, we propose a simple and effective technique to allow for efficient self-supervised learning with bi-directional Transformers. Our approach is motivated by recent studies demonstrating that self-attention patterns in trained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Karthik Narasimhan

Hypergraphs are vital in modelling data with higher-order relations containing more than two entities, gaining prominence in machine learning and signal processing. Many hypergraph neural networks leverage message passing over hypergraph…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-09 Bohan Tang , Siheng Chen , Xiaowen Dong

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Francesco Innocenti , El Mehdi Achour

Modern large language models (LLMs) excel at tasks that require storing and retrieving knowledge, such as factual recall and question answering. Transformers are central to this capability because they can encode information during training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-18 Nuri Mert Vural , Alberto Bietti , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Denny Wu

Transformers perform inference by iteratively transforming token representations across layers. This layerwise computation has been studied empirically, and recent mean-field theories of Transformer dynamics explain how attention can drive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Noboru Isobe , Daisuke Inoue , Masaaki Imaizumi

Contextual information at inference time, such as demonstrations, retrieved knowledge, or interaction history, can substantially improve large language models (LLMs) without parameter updates, yet its theoretical role remains poorly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Dingzirui Wang , Xuanliang Zhang , Keyan Xu , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che , Yang Deng

Transformer-based models have achieved remarkable results in low-level vision tasks including image super-resolution (SR). However, early Transformer-based approaches that rely on self-attention within non-overlapping windows encounter…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-18 Cansu Korkmaz , A. Murat Tekalp

Memory-based meta-learning is a technique for approximating Bayes-optimal predictors. Under fairly general conditions, minimizing sequential prediction error, measured by the log loss, leads to implicit meta-learning. The goal of this work…