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Understanding the internal mechanisms of GPT-style transformers, particularly their capacity to perform in-context learning (ICL), is critical for advancing AI alignment and interpretability. In-context learning allows transformers to…
We introduce a constrained optimization framework for training transformers that behave like optimization descent algorithms. Specifically, we enforce layerwise descent constraints on the objective function and replace standard empirical…
Meta-learning stands for 'learning to learn' such that generalization to new tasks is achieved. Among these methods, Gradient-based meta-learning algorithms are a specific sub-class that excel at quick adaptation to new tasks with limited…
We consider a bilevel learning framework for learning linear operators. In this framework, the learnable parameters are optimized via a loss function that also depends on the minimizer of a convex optimization problem (denoted lower-level…
Pre-trained transformers exhibit the capability of adapting to new tasks through in-context learning (ICL), where they efficiently utilize a limited set of prompts without explicit model optimization. The canonical communication problem of…
Deep learning has shown that learned functions can dramatically outperform hand-designed functions on perceptual tasks. Analogously, this suggests that learned optimizers may similarly outperform current hand-designed optimizers, especially…
Pretrained transformers exhibit the remarkable ability of in-context learning (ICL): they can learn tasks from just a few examples provided in the prompt without updating any weights. This raises a foundational question: can ICL solve…
Adaptive gradient algorithms perform gradient-based updates using the history of gradients and are ubiquitous in training deep neural networks. While adaptive gradient methods theory is well understood for minimization problems, the…
Planning is a crucial element of both human intelligence and contemporary large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we initiate a theoretical investigation into the emergence of planning capabilities in Transformer-based LLMs via their…
Adaptive optimizers like AdamW apply uniform hyperparameters across all parameter groups, ignoring heterogeneous optimization dynamics across layers and modules. We address this limitation by proposing MetaAdamW - a new optimizer that…
We study the in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of pretrained Transformers in the setting of nonlinear regression. Specifically, we focus on a random Transformer with a nonlinear MLP head where the first layer is randomly initialized…
A candidate explanation of the good empirical performance of deep neural networks is the implicit regularization effect of first order optimization methods. Inspired by this, we prove a convergence theorem for nonconvex composite…
Understanding why Transformers perform so well remains challenging due to their non-convex optimization landscape. In this work, we analyze a shallow Transformer with $m$ independent heads trained by projected gradient descent in the kernel…
In-context learning (ICL) is one of the surprising and useful features of large language models and subject of intense research. Recently, stylized meta-learning-like ICL setups have been devised that train transformers on sequences of…
Recent research has shown that Transformers with linear attention are capable of in-context learning (ICL) by implementing a linear estimator through gradient descent steps. However, the existing results on the optimization landscape apply…
Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…
We study inverse optimization (IO), where the goal is to use a parametric optimization program as the hypothesis class to infer relationships between input-decision pairs. Most of the literature focuses on learning only the objective…
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…
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…
Highly dynamic tasks that require large accelerations and precise tracking usually rely on accurate models and/or high gain feedback. While kinematic optimization allows for efficient representation and online generation of hitting…